f you ever wake up in the morning and think, 'Life would be so much better if everyone behaved exactly the same,' then I recommend you either take a cold shower, or read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. For here's a book that takes the notion of a perfectly ordered society and runs it to its logical conclusion … Continue reading We: A Sermon in Glass and Giggles
Tag: books
Anno Dracula: Empire of the Undead
What if the monster had won? It’s the forbidden question behind so much of Gothic literature. We tidy our novels with the crucifix triumphant and the stake neatly driven home, as if evil may always be dispatched with a mallet and a bit of ash. Yet Kim Newman, that merry necromancer of the imagination, dared … Continue reading Anno Dracula: Empire of the Undead
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 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 