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Dan Hicks
I suppose it will have been in late 1971 or early 1972. I was meeting my girlfriend, but had stopped on the way to pick up my monthly copy of Zigzag, an odd, rather amateurishly produced alternative magazine that featured articles and interviews about mainly American rock music. It wasn’t like Sounds or NME, which…
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Eric Ambler: The Levanter
I read, as I suppose many of my generation did, Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios and Epitaph for a Spy when I was a teenager. They were exciting tales of action in a Europe on the brink of war, with heroes not of the John Buchan mould (I’d read the Richard Hannay books of…
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Entartete Musik
To the Manchester Jewish Museum, on Holocaust Memorial Day, for a concert of music condemned and banned by the Nazis as “degenerate.” This was a bold move by the museum, which has decided to host more events to gain attention ahead of a big rebuilding programme. After a glass of (kosher, of course) wine, we…
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Big in Japan 3
Onto the Philosopher’s Walk in Kyoto. Note the position of the apostrophe: we are talking about one philosopher here, Nishida Kitaro, a professor at the university, who walked here daily in the nineteen twenties, and whose work, rather pleasingly, is described as “path-breaking.” Nishida’s best-known philosophical concept is “Absolute Nothingness” but it’s difficult to imagine…
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Shiny New Books
Shiny New Books 8 is now out. As usual, it features an eclectic range of book reviews both fiction and non-fiction, including my take on the fourth Paul Dark espionage novel. There’s also my guide to the fiction of Manchester. But don’t let that put you off – there’s lots of stuff here to whet…
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Jeremy Duns: The Moscow Option
The third volume in Jeremy Duns’s terrific Paul Dark series takes our troubled agent back to the beginning of his career, to meet his nemesis in a scenario where the world is in danger from a possible nuclear war. I would strongly urge you to read the first two volumes if you haven’t done already…
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Big in Japan 2
We took the Shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto from Tokyo. These trains are an absolute delight: spacious, smooth, quiet, incredibly fast, and punctual to the second. Mobile phones are banned completely, except in the space between carriages, and even then, you are expected to keep it quiet. The result is a carefree and relaxing journey,…
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Jeremy Duns: Song of Treason
Not that long into this second instalment of the Paul Dark saga, I found myself reading an obscure article from the online archive of the Catholic newspaper The Tablet. I had been moved to check something in Duns’s text, because it sounded rather unlikely. Had there really been a small explosion in St Peter’s, Rome…
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Big in Japan 1
In October and November last year, ‘er indoors and I travelled to Japan. We stayed in Tokyo, Kyoto and Kanazawa, and travelled to Hiroshima too. It was an absolutely fascinating trip, during which most of my preconceptions about the country were challenged, and I felt that I learned a lot, but also that there was…
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Free Agent
Spy novels have a long pedigree in English. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) can probably be counted the first in the genre. Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands, published four years earlier, is really a thriller, establishing the John Buchan style: plucky Brit gentleman adventurer foils dastardly plot by fiendish foreigners, a template…