Elvis monkeys around

Putting to one side the slight sense of discomfort caused by seeing a middle-aged man surrounded by a bunch of much younger women wearing swimsuits, this video brought back happy memories of a cracking Elvis Costello album from 2004. I remember driving to Birmingham to see the tour with my friend Pete from university; it...

Margins: Life and Fate (a graveyard)

I’m a couple of hundred pages into the mammoth 20th Century Russian classic Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. I’m sure I read somewhere that it was ‘about Stalingrad’, but that feels like it’s a bit of a red herring: the Second World War battle for that city looks to feature only loosely, as an...

Wonderful stories from childhood

I bought this on a whim a little while back: a lovely hardback copy that feels as if it’s just been lifted from the library round the corner from my primary school. It’s funny how certain otherwise unremarkable stories stay in your mind long past childhood: in this case it was the tale of the...

Don’t just ‘think positive’

This time of year is full of guff about how to make and keep resolutions. This piece stood out as at least being rather more specific and practical, and rooted in evidence (even if from small scale studies). What I found particularly interesting was the contention that the bland old exhortation 'think positive' can, by...

Two books I finished reading on holiday

Hard to think of two novels less alike than Iain M. Banks' penultimate sci-fi epic Surface Detail and the first in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All The Pretty Horses. For me they're linked only by having started both whilst working in Abu Dhabi, and having finished each from a grapevine-sheltered terrace high above Dubrovnik. Surface...

The hazards of a fast start

I would be even prouder than I am of having finished the Paris Marathon a month ago if I hadn't messed it up a bit. With the benefit of hindsight I did several things wrong: my time goal was unrealistic in light of my fitness, I made no adjustment to that goal to account for...

Take note

My job involves lots of notetaking, at meetings, so it was with real practical interest that I read this article in The Atlantic, about a new study into whether taking notes on laptop or by hand helps you to recall what you've written better. The nub of it: “We don’t write longhand as fast as...

Obama’s better organised campaign wasn’t the deciding factor

Really interesting article this on which were the decisive factors in Obama's general election victory in 2012. Particularly timely and potentially relevant in light of the recent news about David Axelrod being hired to advise Labour's campaign... whilst the context is obviously very different, the key point seems to be that it's the big issues...

Norfolk was nearly nuked

The Special Relationship between the UK and US: forged in the white heat of the world wars and the years following, right? Or: England used as far-enough-away prep area for terrifyingly unstable early nuclear weapons. Some partnership! If I ever had any doubt that this relationship was always, ultimately, carried out on the United States'...

Dickensian debtors’ jails… in the modern US

A fifty-something woman, Debra Ford, is pulled over by the police in rural Alabama for a faulty taillight. She is driving without a licence and receives a fine which she struggles to pay, having been surviving on $670 a month disability payments after a car accident a decade earlier. What happens next is an astonishing...