Uncategorized Archive
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
When I wrote 'The Shrimp and the Radiator', I was thinking of Edward Lear.
It was 'The Owl and the Pussycat' that made me invent a mismatched duo, gloriously happy to live outside convention.
But it was 'There was an old man of Whitehaven' that made me avoid a happy ending for ...
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Thursday, March 5th, 2009
So one of the important things about biographies and autobiographies is that they claim to be true.
Some of them do so implicitly, simply by being sincere and giving us no reason to think that this is fiction.
Some make their claim explicitly:
Celebrity autobiographies often tell us: what you've read in the ...
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Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
I like the metaphor of making.
Making sense
Making love
Make believe
Makeup
Making friends
Making enemies
Making mincemeat.
These are dead metaphors now, but if we view them literally they all suggest the idea of invention or transformation.
When we make sense, we create something new out of what is there - a text is nothing until we ...
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Saturday, June 7th, 2008
The only thing I'm finding boring about Big Brother as it begins its ninth full series is the debate about whether or not it's boring.
As I read Cilla Black's thoughts in the Metro this week and recognise echoes from elsewhere, I think of that other dull debate that surfaces every ...
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Saturday, December 1st, 2007
Although delivering a narrative in the present tense is by no means a modern technique, its popularity seems to be growing among contemporary novelists.
Many modern novelists shift between the past and present tense to distinguish between the multiple narratives they are presenting. In Justin Cartwright’s The Promise of Happiness, the ...
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