Columnist’s Note: In a little under 24 hours, I have to submit the final manuscript of my next book. My original deadline – January 1st – sailed past weeks ago, as did the one-week extension I awarded myself on the basis that no-one does any work in the first week of the year. This last [...]

I’m 1000 words behind my target already. No time to waste writing this post.
I’ve decided that it was XFM distracting me. Too many lyrics. Instead I’ve switched to this Spotify playlist. Five days of classical music. That should do it.

Looks like it’s going to be my third all nighter in as many nights. I’m three weeks past my original book deadline and six days away from my revised, last chance saloon, can’t possibly be missed or I’ll destroy the entire publishing machine, deadline.
Tonight I have to write 6000 words. An entire chapter re-write. I’m [...]

As a transplanted Brit in America, I’m having something of a hard time getting my head around this whole Late Night debacle.
Unlike most American television, late night talk shows – the Conans, the Lettermans, the Carsons (he’s the one who’s dead, right?) – never really made it out to the rest of the world.
The first, [...]

What do we know about Gaspar Llamazares? For a start, we know he’s a Spanish politician, a former Communist party member and leader of the leftist coalition Izquierda Unida. We know he has a Masters in Public Health from the University of Havana. We know he once attacked the Pope for his stance on contraception [...]

(A few months back, the German cultural magazine, Kulturaustausch, asked me to write a column on the stereotype of American women being attracted to British men. It was published this week in German – here’s the English translation…)

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.” – John F. Kennedy

So this is a little weird.
In May of last year, I wrote a short post about Mark McGowan – a London-based performance ‘artist’ who had decided to stage a tawdry ‘reenactment’ of ‘The Death of Jade Goody’. Here’s some of what I wrote…
“Mark McGowan – if because you haven’t heard of him – is a [...]

In case you missed it…

I’ve never understood the attraction of CES.
Why in January – a month set aside for recovering from the excesses of the holiday season – thousands of people would fly to Las Vegas for a gigantic tradeshow. Why they’d even consider spending four days wandering around an aircraft hanger filled with vastly oversized television sets, or [...]