Kester Brewin

Having been urged by lots of After Magic readers to go and see Iron Man 3, I saw it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The series has always had more biting wit that similar franchises, and has done well combining that with some thoughtful content too. I don’t want to talk much about the [...]

Went to see The Book of Mormon last night. I’ll be reviewing it on William Crawley’s BBC Radio show on Sunday morning, but thought I’d blog a few thoughts here too. Firstly, it’s a great musical. I’m no great fan of musical theatre to be honest [in mathematical terms, it's non-additive music (fab) + theatre [...]

Very excited that After Magic will be available in the next few days now. It’s a compact read at around 25,000 words, but covers a lot of ground within that. As I’ve increasingly found with the books I’ve written, the source material that’s given rise to After Magic isn’t really the kind of stuff you’d [...]

Last night I went to see The Effect at the National Theatre, a new play by Lucy Prebble, who made waves with her previous piece ENRON. (It ‘stars’ Billie Piper, who I’d not seen on stage before but – just as an aside – her performance confirmed so much that I’d heard: she’s a very [...]

Interesting piece here exploring the fact that today ‘Please Please Me’ – the hit that really made the band famous – has gone into the public domain, as its 50 year copyright period has expired. The article takes the view that this is a tragedy, one that leaves The Beatles’ music open to exploitation. Anything [...]

Spoiler alert: there’s really not a great deal of fundamental narrative action in this film. No twists to reveal. But if you’d rather not know too much about the film before you see it, don’t read on. // I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film The Master on Friday night. Here’s the thing: I sent [...]

There always seems to be a steady stream of posts from literary magazine sites giving lists of advice for writers. Zadie Smith has a series of 10 points in The Atlantic at the moment, highlights including Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All [...]

Interesting story (thanks @KevinThow for the link) about Julia Schramm – a leading member of the German Pirate Party, who signed a very lucrative book deal for her book ‘Click Me‘ – more than $130k – and then proceeded to go after the very pirates who she lauds in her work. One of the key [...]

I’m a big fan of Steven Johnson, and have a lot to thank him for. His book Emergence was massive for me in terms of my thinking in so many areas, and The Ghost Map is still one of my favourite books – particularly because I know the streets that it talks about so well. [...]

Tweeted about this piece earlier today, but wanted to flag up and reflect further on Henry Marsh’s piece in Granta, detailing his neurosurgical work operating on a tumour in a pineal gland. The pineal gland is buried deep within the brain, and is thus only reached after a perilous journey through the physical matter that [...]