Zugzwang is a favourite word of mine. It’s a German term, meaning ‘compulsion to move’, but it was adopted into English in the early 1900s through chess. Zugzwang is a position on the chess board where you are still in the game, with a number of moves available to you, every one of which loses.Read More
For many years my name was unusual; I thought, perhaps, unique. There were few people called Luke when I was growing up (things started to change following the release of Star Wars in 1977). The surname McKernan was a rarity outside of parts of Northern Ireland. The combination of Luke McKernan, the bringing together ofRead More
The other day I watched Moonstruck, the 1987 film set among the Italian-American community of New York, starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. It’s a delightful production, which scarcely puts a foot wrong in any department. I had not seen it some twenty years, but something remarkable occurred. I could remember every single element of theRead More
In two years’ time, it will be the four hundredth anniversary of the newspaper in this country. The first known newspaper in English, Corrant out of Italy, Germany, &c. was published on 2 December 1620, in Amsterdam. A year later, on 24 September 1621, the first newspaper was published in this country, the Corante, or,Read More
Last in this series looking back on 2018 is the year in images. St Helena, Ireland, the Lake District, around Kent, working in London, and much reading. My pictures (bar one), my memories. Most of the photographs I take end up on my Flickr site, for anyone who might be interested (all under a CreativeRead More
Next in these reviews of the year is things seen on screen. Now that the boundaries between film, television and Netflix have blurred so utterly, it seems foolish to think of the various forms of screen entertainment or instruction as being separate from one another. We separate them only out of habit. Anyway, here areRead More
Third in this series of reviews of the year, from my humble perspective, is music. While live music was only occasional, and then too often disappointing (I shall mention no names), recorded music was quite splendid. Spotify is one of the great cultural enablers of the age. Yes, the audio quality is sub-standard, and theRead More
Next in these reviews of the year is the year in books. I read a lot in 2018, and it was a vintage year: for books published in 2018, for those I finally caught up on, and (best of all) all those unexpected surprises from times past. I’ve put the highlights into nine categories, withRead More
Yes, 2018 is winding its way, unapologetically, to the bitter and, and it is time for some reviews of the year. As in past years, I’m producing a series of posts over December listing some of the things cultural that appealed to me over the year. To kick things off, here’s the year online –Read More
The 1970 film Five Easy Pieces is generally held to be among the best of the classic 70s period of Hollywood cinema. It tells of an oil rig worker, Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), who comes from a privileged, classical music-playing family, from which he has tried to escape. He travels home when he learns thatRead More