Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about the director Peter Jackson’s plans to produce documentary featuring colourised footage from the First World War. Though nothing was available of the film bar a single still, I was alarmed by the rationale behind it. The argument seemed to be that digital technology now allowed usRead More
The other day it was the sixth anniversary of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games. I’d forgotten the date but spotted a reminder the day after, and decided once again to look at the video of the ceremony. I’ve seen it many times now – the original broadcast, the repeat broadcasts, theRead More
Skimming through Twitter early on a Saturday morning I caught sight of a message from the Before Shakespeare project. It invited its followers to come to an event that afternoon to celebrate and explore the history of The Curtain, one of the first London 16th-century theatres, whose archaeological site was only recently discovered. So offRead More
It is with not a little relief that I have set aside a half-written, half-baked philosophical post on who can say what and decided to write some lists instead. It’s summertime, and the brain needs a holiday. Arbitrary listings of the purely inconsequential are the answer. I’m going to start with the Beatles. I likeRead More
What a magical image this is. An audience of young people has packed a theatre, to such a degree that some are on the stage, while others sit perilously on the edge of the balcony, their legs hanging over. They are fresh-faced, eager, revelling in where they are and who they are. A man andRead More
I was in the south-west of Ireland recently, on business matters but with a couple of days extra in which to explore. And so I went to Kinsale. It’s a small town, not far from Cork, located at a river mouth feeding out into the sea, its harbour facing a long cove, beyond which liesRead More
Zone Out (via The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) I am aware that I am turning into something of a robot bore. Whatever the human activity, be it work or pleasure, I have become far too prone in conversation to tell people how said activity will be taken over and then transformed by artificial intelligence. AndRead More
There was a piece in The Times recently in which assorted experts – artists, art historians, gallery owners, critics – were asked to tell us the best way to appreciate a painting. Their responses ranged from the practical (choosing the picture you admire and devoting deep time to it), to the impractical (visit the galleryRead More
Some years ago I had a bright idea. It was for a mechanism which would bring together all of the indexes of digitised books to make one super-index linking back to each of those texts. Yes there would be huge unevenness between the individual indexes, and yes it had a Borgesian air about it (Borges’Read More
I met many people during my two weeks on St Helena, but two encounters have stuck with me in particular. The first was with a Saint (as the locals are called), a successful businessman who had been all around the globe and had just returned to the island. He was super-confident about St Helena, itsRead More