Good grief, where have 20 years gone. Lived on this boat at Kew in 2004, renting a room off a Kiwi opera singer. Water rats the size of cats, and a pet heron I used to feed Sunday roast leftovers. I started writing my first novel on board...

Conan Doyle was a great amateur pugilist. Took on a swarthy Scottish seaman in a fight on a voyage to the Arctic and was praised by his opponent as 'the best sur-r-r-geon we ever had -he's blacked my ee.' Wrote many boxing stories (e.g. Rodney Stone)

Ted Hughes in his prime would take some beating, I reckon. But maybe some brawler like Kerouac. Bukowski would fight dirty and, no matter how hard you hit him, would just keep getting up. Any more bets?

Blade Runner (1982) dir. Ridley Scott

Love ravens... The epigraph for Tokyo, via John Gray.

one of the greatest moments in pop history is George Michael breaking out the iambic tetrameter in Careless Whisper. And those rhymes so elegant🤌😙

Talking about book to film adaptations with Sarah Perry Stratford Literary Festival on May 4, and by the metric of books I have read that have been made into films, here are four huge hits on screen AND the page.

What four would you choose?

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Fear the dog running on a flat-roof pub...

'We should all be grateful that he continues to write, for the view that someone should be killed for writing a book is more obscene than anything that can be expressed in a novel.' Tomiwa Owolade on Rushie and Knife UnHerd unherd.com/?post_type=new…

What a film. The reason I tried to ride a motorbike across Australia in 1995... Ghost and Chrome via Wild Court wildcourt.co.uk/ghost-and-chro…

MAD MAX was released 45 years ago this week. Acclaimed as one of the great independent films, and the movie that launched the career of star Mel Gibson, the making of story is a ride through a dystopian wasteland…

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In season 10 of the taut thriller '24', retired federal agent Jack Bauer resurfaces as a small press publisher, tasked with his most difficult mission yet: to sell a single copy of a poetry book in a 24-hour period

We seem to have the worst of both worlds in the U.K. - Americans, on average are much richer than we are and other Europeans have far better public services, infrastructure & quality of life. We are paying Nordic levels of tax & have nothing to show for it.