Cinema, despite its thunderous claims to originality, is in truth a great necromancer. It raises the dead more often than it invents the living, and its spirits wear borrowed costumes even when paraded as new. When James Wan and Leigh Whannell conjured Insidious, they weren’t scribbling out some pristine mythology in a Hollywood boardroom but … Continue reading Dreams That Wander Too Far: From Plato to The Further
Month: September 2025
The Privy as Polis: Sir John Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax
It’s one of the odder ironies of English letters that Sir John Harington, courtier, poet, and godson to Elizabeth I, is remembered not for his verse but for his privy. Not his own privy parts, mind you, but the contraption he nicknamed the ‘Ajax’ - a flushing water-closet that, in its mechanical elegance, promised to … Continue reading The Privy as Polis: Sir John Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax
The Writing Girl: A Love Letter in Marble
Giovanni Spertini, The Writing Girl, c. 19th century. Marble sculpture. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. Marble has no business being this soft. Giovanni Spertini, born in Milan in 1821, clearly never got the memo. With a chisel and an unholy amount of patience, he coaxed flesh, lace, and even stationery out of Carrara stone … Continue reading The Writing Girl: A Love Letter in Marble
The Man in the Lift
On Being Mistaken for Death Itself, and Other Occupational Hazards Testing the water here and posting an extract from the book I’m writing - be gentle with me. In the 1990s, there was a hospital in the city where I worked that we in the profession referred to, with a kind of grim familiarity, as … Continue reading The Man in the Lift
On the Tyranny of Sameness
“We’ll all be free and we’ll all think alike, as a free people does; and them that don’t won’t be allowed to think different.” What an epigram of our age - though spurious in origin, it speaks truer of our times than many a sanctioned sermon. We needn’t trouble ourselves with the dull bibliographies of … Continue reading On the Tyranny of Sameness
Wording 