On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me…four horrendously creepy volumes of short stories. Because my award-winning ‘Devil Quartet’, Personal Demons, The Devil in Me, Old Devil Moon and Demonized are about to come out as e-books! Here you’ll find out what happened to the cutlery of the Marquis de Sade, […]

M’Lud, I am here to argue that our country is still as eccentric as it always was, and in some cases considerably more so. I will now submit my evidence. The Winter Solstice, time for Pagans, Druids and other mentally disenfranchised loners to head to Stonehenge to mumble about ley lines, past-life regression, homeopathy and other […]

What do the following names have in common? Winston Churchill, Raymond Chandler, John Lennon, Muriel Spark, JB Priestley, Bram Stoker, F Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Daphne Du Maurier, Noel Coward, HG Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson. Answer: They all wrote short stories. Some were macabre and fantastical, some involved detectives or ghosts, some were pulpy and […]

This week I was thinking about our working days. I’d read that UK students had voted to install sleep pods, and that in the US workers are not compensated if Christmas Day falls on a weekend. It has also been announced that the siesta, treasured central plank of Latin countries’ economic plan, is to be removed […]

At this time of the year I try to do something for myself that conjures the spirit of Christmases past. This year, it was a double bill of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ in Edwardian finery, relocated on either side of the Great War in an English country house, based on Charlecote Park near […]

My friend Michele sent this from French web-comic Cyprien (what is it with the single names in Europe?) for anyone who has felt left out by advancing technology.

The first big shock I got watching ‘Rogue One’ was how much better it was than the last Star Wars film, a piece of forgettable fan service masquerading as a movie. But then, this supposedly stand-alone adventure is from Gareth ‘Monsters’ Edwards, a British director who already has great form. The second was realising that […]

At dinner with my neighbours last night, film director Mike Figgis told me that he reads five newspapers each morning and it’s a habit that is now taking its toll – I know what he means; between the hungry children of Aleppo and the billionaires’ club of Trump the end of this annus horribilis feels […]

Okay, so Post-Brexit is shaping up to be horrible, but if you think you’re about to have it bad, maybe you should look back to Post-War. The anthropologist Tom Harrison returned from the South Pacific after looking for cannibals, and reached a startling conclusion; remote tribes were less interesting than the people of Bolton, where […]

I would like to think of myself as one of Churchill’s children, imbued with a fundamental knowledge of what is required to be a decent, moral person. It puts me on the side of Edward Snowden, and this past week I’ve become fascinated by the backlash against Oliver Stone’s film about him. In the UK […]