Book Review – June 2026 To paraphrase Rod Stewart, Wrexham is in my heart, it’s in my soul, it’s my best friend. It shaped me and continues to be a dominant influence in my life &…

Chester is situated on an elbow of Watling Street, one of Britain’s major Roman roads.  One branch issues south towards London and the other runs east across the Pennines to York.  Chester’s import…

The Jago is not only a geographical area but an existential state of desperation A Child of the Jago is London-born journalist Arthur Morrison’s best known novel. It was first published in November…

Book Review – March 2026 Do you know what it’s like to feel wrong twenty-four hours a day? Do you know what it’s like to be disapproved of, not only for what you do and say and th…

A market town, a parliamentary borough, the head of a Union, and a parish, chiefly in the hundred of Bromfield, county of Denbigh; 26 miles (SE by E) from Denbigh, 18 (ESE) from Ruthin, and 187½ (N…

Walking along the foreshore of the Dee estuary near Parkgate, enjoying the silence and the wide vista of land and sky, I was put in mind of the old poem by Charles Kingsley, The Sands of Dee.  King…

I attended the Montréal World Film Festival while travelling in Québec in 2016. I remember it was a slightly chaotic affair and it came as no surprise that the festival, founded in 1977, finally fo…

Until relatively recently, women have been noticeable only by their absence from the tradition of Anglo-American high modernism. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence and W.B.…

On voit un chiffonnier qui vient, hochant la tête, Butant, et se cognant aux murs comme un poète, Et, sans prendre souci des mouchards, ses sujets, Epanche tout son coeur en glorieux projets. Cha…

In many ways The Arcades Project is Benjamin’s lament for the passing of the flâneur. For Benjamin, the flâneur’s disappearance functions as a symbol for the ravages of capitalism upon metrop…

In fact and in fantasy, London had become a contested terrain: new commercial spaces and journalist practices, expanding networks of female philanthropy, and a range of public spectacles . . . enab…

The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automa…

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway Peter Walsh is the most obvious flâneur character; he is able to wander the streets of London with an abandon even the patrician Clarissa Dalloway cannot man…

(Cities were) more than accidental meeting places and crossing points. They were generative environments of the new arts, focal points of intellectual community, indeed of intellectual conflict and…

The passing of the historical figure paved the way for the resurrection of the flâneur as a methodological persona, adopted in order to pursue the exploration of the city. Stripped to its ba…

That from this castle’s tatter’d battlements           Our fair appointments may be well perused.           Methinks King Richard and myself should meet           With no less…

Time for another batch of short reviews. The two novels I’m reviewing in this post contain elements such as folklore, witches, fantasy and ghosts for example, that seldom feature in my reading. If I d...

Writer, performer and broadcaster with a talent for being interested in everything and a particular fascination with British counterculture

Judge Rogers speaks to several key members of the team who made the ecologically-minded thriller for the BBC

Rossum’s Universal Robots is a play written by the Czech dramatist, Karel Čapek, in 1920 and was first performed on stage in 1921. It is known as Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti in the original Czech …

Anna of the Five Towns was the first of Arnold Bennett’s novels to be set in the pottery towns of Staffordshire. Through six novels published between 1902 and 1918 he gives a realistic picture of life...

Dave Haslam and Melanie Williams join us to discuss A Taste of Honey (1958), Shelagh Delaney's first play, written and produced when the author was not yet 20 years old. To describe this as an ...

I found my copy of Gillian Tindall’s The Fields Beneath in a second-hand bookshop in Wigtown, Dumfries and Galloway one August afternoon last year.  Strange to be buying a London book on a visit to…

Writer, historian and biographer who wove archaeology, social history, myth and religion into her work

Through songs I dreamt the stories of the boat, listening to its sounds and its silences. Rocketman is the debut album of London-based sound artist and composer, Lizzy Laurance. To work on her proj…

Their performance lasted about half an hour and they sung about eight numbers, although because of all the noise the fans were making, and the primitive sound system on stage, you couldn’t hear any…

He was a unique man and a great musician. We shared a love of history… he could turn a mundane drive through London into a colourful, historical, guided tour. … Even though he had been unwell… the …

YouTube video by Shut Out The Light Films

I attended the Montréal World Film Festival while travelling in Québec in 2016. I remember it was a slightly chaotic affair and it came as no surprise that the festival, founded in 1977, finally fo…

I attended the Montréal World Film Festival while travelling in Québec in 2016. I remember it was a slightly chaotic affair and it came as no surprise that the festival, founded in 1977, finally fo…

I and we are wildlife whose natural habitat is libraries, when it comes to physical space, because they contain books in which minds roam free through time and space, encounter Dogen and Dante and Sap...

Claire Fuller’s Costa award-winning novel was a highly enjoyable companion on my summer road trip around parts of the UK.

My backhanded, somewhat grudging tribute to Bath, from a Bristolian.

My new book Flint Country: a stone journey will be published on July 10th. Here’s a link to the blog post I wrote about it for the publisher, Saraband.