#james-lewis

#james-lewis

My mother bought me Stanley Bagshaw and the Short-sighted Football Trainer by Bob Wilson. I grew up thinking he was the same Bob Wilson who played in goal for Arsenal and presented sport on ITV.

A new campaign is aiming to collect 50 objects that sum up Englishness in an effort to move the conversation away from reductive arguments over whether to hang a St George's flag or not. Supported by the Green party politician Caroline Lucas, the musician and campaigner Billy Bragg, and Kojo Koram, a law professor, the A Very English Chat campaign hopes to tackle England's growing social divisions and political polarisation.

Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits' end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits are capacious: easily enlarged to allow idiosyncrasy to bloom into neurosis, preoccupation into obsession.

Unlike the agents created by writers such as Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Graham Greene - characters who moved in the upper echelons of the intelligence field - the nameless protagonist of Mr. Deighton's early spy novels was a working-class man who indulged in insolence and wisecracks as he set out to pull defectors from behind the Iron Curtain, root out moles and thwart criminal madmen.

Britain once ruled over the largest empire in history. For many Britons, it remains a source of pride. Others argue its power was built on a legacy of brutality, colonial conquest and the enslavement of millions. Can Britain reckon with that past and make amends?

The SoA said the absence of any government measure to compel tech companies to label AI-generated output meant readers were struggling to distinguish between books written by a human, and machine-generated work based on AI models trained on copyrighted work without permission or payment.

One of Vija Celmins's wonderful Night Sky works. Maybe one of her charcoal drawings of the cosmos, with a comet flaring across the surface. She conjures up such immensity, and such intimacy, with countless tiny points of light shining out of the darkness. Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world? In a word, Paris. After I left school, I spent several weeks working in Paris and discovered the pleasures of looking, on my own, for myself.

The Oxford Artisan Distillery (TOAD) produces its whiskey, gin, vodka and liqueur from heritage wheat and rye varieties rediscovered in the thatch of medieval roofs. It's an example of the extraordinary lengths the distillers go here to create their unique flavours while building a regenerative farming system along the way. Tour the distillery to find out all about the processes involved,

"Miss Havisham is a quite extraordinary figure" she said, "it's just so interesting to see this woman who decides 'I'm independently wealthy and I'm going to have a child even though I haven't got married.' "It's fascinating that a male author came up with the idea of a woman bringing up a beautiful young woman to break men's hearts, to get her revenge on men."

The extended footage of Welsh in conversation is certainly engaging, as he discusses his writing and the movies it created, and his own youth in Edinburgh. Some of the rest of the interviewees aren't quite so gripping, however, and the film is padded out with a fair bit of redundant anecdotage from people on the subject of getting hilariously wasted in Irvine's company or at least his approximate vicinity.

Best known as a memoirist, Morrison returns to poetry after 11 years with a masterclass of lyric distillation and charged observation, demonstrating that nothing is beneath poetic deliberation. His subjects range from social and political justice to meditations on poetic heroes such as Elizabeth Bishop and sonnet sequences elegising the writer's sister. The interwoven specificity and occasional nature of the poems is captivating:

At the start of A Single Man, George Falconer wakes up at home in the morning and drags himself despondently to the bathroom. There he stares at himself in the mirror, observing not so much a face as the expression of a predicament a dull harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle.