Kester Brewin

A quite brilliant piece of TV on BBC 4 tonight. Worth the license fee on its own, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives traced the journey of Eels front-man Mark Everett uncovering the life of his father, the eminent physicist Hugh Everett III. Everett Snr, in a radical challenge to the Quantum Mechanical orthodoxy of the day, [...]

Poor thing! Technorati: Facebook

I, for one, won’t be buying an Amazon ‘Kindle’, at least for some time yet. I think the prediction of this being ‘iPod for books’ is way off for the simple reason that the media are totally different. Music is not physical. Sure, you could thumb through the album artwork, and that was a great [...]

The Customs and Revenue department announced today that it had somehow ‘mislaid’ discs containing all of the details of 25 million people in Britain claiming Child Benefit. Personal details, bank details, National Insurance numbers and addresses were all part of the records that went missing in an internal mail delivery. And this is within a [...]

Just back from a wonderful weekend in the depths of Wales. I didn’t find RS Thomas, or any great rural epiphany, but, in keeping with the joys of weekends in other people’s houses, had a great time dipping into some books. The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics*. It’s an eccentric volume itself, but [...]

Apologies for those of you who’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for the Facebook article I blogged about a while ago (it’s OK – I don’t really believe that It got bumped to December’s issue, so will be out shortly. I’ve led two discussion groups recently, one in a crypt, one in a library – go [...]

OK, so Howies opened a store in Carnaby Street – their first in London. Which is great. I hope they do well. But I have to admit their attitude to the city – and to London in particular – has been mostly negative. Indeed, their catalogues in the past have regularly been virtual tracts for [...]

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a magnificent movie. No voice-over. No animation. No mock-ups. Just archive footage, and interviews with the Apollo astronauts. It’s stunning as a film, stunning to be reminded of perhaps the single greatest technological feat of mankind, and stunning to be reminded – in a way Gore never quite [...]

Technorati: Memory | Remembrance | War

Very interesting article by Nicholas Guyett, around Chris Hedges’ book in the current issue of the London Review of Books. Hedges was a theology student, and is also a very experienced war reporter. Well worth a read, or buy the book here. “According to Hedges, we may be only one cataclysmic event away from a [...]