Horizon Review: long-needed update

February 9, 2013

Well, this is how things happen. By attrition. Before you know it, it’s happened. It’s been a long time since the last issue of Horizon Review came out. To be honest, it’s been quite a while since I agreed with Chris Hamilton-Emery – who owned it – that it was just too much to undertake. [...]

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Freedom and Bangor

February 3, 2013

Photo: Max Reeves / Trilobite Olmstead NO time: but the day after the firebombing of Freedom Press (& bookshop) in Whitechapel, this picture emerges from the wreckage. Headlines on this day were about: Sam Cameron’s father being adviser (what is with this ‘er’, these days??) to Kuwait in its business interests (on the basis that he agrees [...]

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I am Spartacus

February 1, 2013

Here’s an exchange I had today: Hey Aunt B, let me take a picture of you in your new dressing gown. People have been concerned, so I want to send them a picture of you looking all cosy. People? What people? Why are they ‘concerned’? Oh you know – the kids, my  mother… of course [...]

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Happy birthday dear Mozart

January 27, 2013

Forget all that stuff I wrote yesterday about the vanity of human wishes and all that; well; no, don’t forget: you must all still read Vanity Fair and remember that each of us is only a tiny bit part in the Human Comedy. But I’m sure I’ve written before now about the station manager at [...]

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Everything goes strange in the snow

January 26, 2013

Well! That’s been a memorable couple of weeks, then. Last Friday night, the dust was just settling from the transphobic-lesbians-hate-speech-free-speech-twitterstorm debacle, and I was here where I sit now, at the damn screen, trying to work out how to proceed in life now with my new hatemonger identity, when… …unbeknownst to me, across town, my [...]

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TS Eliot Prize: not just the same old same Olds

January 16, 2013

Okay, it’s gone midnight and I’m just beginning to feel like myself again… By now anyone who remotely cares knows that Sharon Olds has won the TS Eliot Prize for her book Stag’s Leap. (I’m so remiss. Blame the free wine and canapés. And I was going to live-tweet it, but at the crucial moment [...]

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TS Eliot Prize: weekend of festivities begins

January 11, 2013

Here in Baroque Mansions we not only do Christmas a little ahead of the herd – we also get stuck into the TS Eliots a day early, with my ‘Techniques of the Shortlisted Poets’ workshop tomorrow. A FEW days early, if you count the bag of books I’ve been carrying around, plus notebook: picture me [...]

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