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Other Things I Wrote

Some things I wrote I particularly like

To Hell and Back, With Bugs

Review 31

‘Mosquitos are like fish: people kill them for pleasure. There is one in my room as I write this. It wants my blood and I want it dead: crushed between my palms, ideally with a fat, vindicating smear of my own blood bursting from its body as it dies.’

The Other City

Review 31

‘I think for everyone there is another city. It’s not the one where you live but the one where you would live, if you had the necessary means and courage.’

Is it possible to like Poussin?

Soft Punk

‘The first thing that strikes you about the paintings of Nicolas Poussin is how ugly they are.’

Inside Handforth: Jackie Weaver and the battle for England’s Soul

1843 Magazine

‘For the 11 centuries between the unification of England in 927 AD and the present day, very little happened in Handforth.’

The Escape Artist: on John le Carré’s letters and Suleika Dawson’s ‘The Secret Heart’

The Los Angeles Review of Books

‘What I think of as the spy novel—its intricacy, jargon, whiff of despair, and bleak moral worldview; its Manichean personal dramas, office knife-fights, and monochrome political superstructure—is in many respects something that sprang from the brain of David Cornwell.’

The Lord of Limits

Substack

We want to get closer to Vermeer. We see his immaculate canvases and we want to be closer to their crystalline shimmer of glamour and tenderness. In the sphere of mass image, Vermeer has a small church and its liturgy is detail: a skein of milk, a filament of lace or reflective metal, a pearl earring.

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