Writing about war, and the pity of war.

Has literary fiction ‘lost the plot’?

Curry was best known for playing the outlandish Frank-N-Furter in cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Dani Garavelli noted recently on Substack that there was no real longform outlet or national platform for Scottish literary criticism anymore.

Writing is stressful. Sitting in my computer chair my neck and shoulder muscles almost immediately tense up as I dig around in my brain for the best phrase or even any coherent string of words.

The paralysis of choice

Anatomy of a mild injury

Buy The Unrecovered by Richard Strachan from Waterstones today! Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders over £25.

I still haven’t had the chance to write anything new for Substack over the last few weeks.

Buy Night Fire: The moving story of World War II jeopardy by Strachan, Richard (ISBN: 9781526670601) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

'Every page, every sentence bears a remarkable intellig…

Almond, Wood, Rundell, Roth.

The film director’s latest movie, Rogue Trooper, is an animated adaptation from British comic 2000AD, discovered when his dad was gigging around the world in the 1980s

Where influences come from

When David Hill and Robert Adamson captured the lives of a small Scottish community in the 1840s, were they creating the first ever social documentary series? A fascinating new book makes the case

I was at the Cymera Festival in Edinburgh on Friday afternoon, appearing on a panel alongside Alex Pheby and Hannah Kaner to discuss our essays in Dan Coxon’s Writing the Magic anthology. The book cov...

This week's AI scandal

The Guardian has been excitably promoting its new list of ‘The 100 Best Novels of All Time’, a perennial favourite of newspaper books pages with space to fill (and generally in reaction to the insane ...

I went along to an event at Argonaut Books on Thursday to hear Nina Allan talk about her and Christopher Priest’s biography of JG Ballard.