Why happiness can’t be strategised
One of the most profound books I read as a younger person was Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. The... View Article
One of the most profound books I read as a younger person was Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. The... View Article
I’ve just turned 40 years old. It’s not an enormous number, not an elephantine age. But it’s a number that... View Article
For our modern age – prone to jump to the defence of science, of data-driven evidence – there is something... View Article
It’s a bad habit, but when I’m in public I often listen in on other people’s conversations. Just recently I... View Article
The Canadian artist David Milne was born in 1882. By all accounts he was a modest man with a leaning... View Article
I’ve never been sure about Coventry railway station. Bold perpendicular lines of grey concrete, shifting mezzanine levels, fierce observance to... View Article
Gursky likes to print his images on very large scale paper. Think Monet’s water lily series at the Orangerie, Paris. So as you approach a work it fills your horizontal field of vision. As well as enveloping you, the technique also has the effect of encouraging you to forget about edges of the picture, to disregard what lies beyond, and to overlook the very deliberate cropping that Gursky undertakes.
The life force of a digital device, a mobile phone or a handheld tablet, can give the impression of something... View Article
For the last six weeks I’ve been going to life drawing classes at a local college. Just as you see... View Article
As a form of literature, the memoir has often struck me as an odd. The author assembles a small museum... View Article
Modernism has a habit of returning, of seeming pertinent as a bearer of explanations, long after its paradigms have been... View Article
Leonard Cohen has died. There is no-one whose specific blend of personal traits has inspired me so strongly. He always... View Article
There are two books that I am perpetually midway through, no matter how many times I pick them up. One... View Article
There are few social-documentary photographs more well known, nor more heavily plundered for significance, than those of rural America from... View Article
The recent acquisition of Lotte Laserstein’s Evening Over Potsdam (Abend über Potsdam, 1930) by the Berlin National Gallery offers the... View Article
The Brexit referendum is now decided, and the fall-out is now unfurling like a virtual-reality landscape. Nothing can be predicted;... View Article
In the victory parades in Paris that crowned the end of the Second World War, the Allied Nations agreed that... View Article
I’m happy say I’m about to be published in the literary magazine Firewords Quarterly, whose latest issue, available from April... View Article
I am yet to arrive at a clear idea of what a European Brexit (yet more portmanteaus!) would mean for... View Article
At the age of 37 I’ve recently come into possession of my first ever car. It has happened sooner than... View Article