The Last Post
- September 05, 2021
- by
- Matt
On March 9, 2011, I wrote the first post on this blog. When I first set it up I was rather tentative about doing it. I was still an Internet novice and I was only just beginning to get to grips with Facebook and Twitter. My daughter helped with the technical stuff, which I never did fully grasp. More than once I’ve pressed the wrong button and seen posts or even the entire webpage disappear, and I’ve been forced to make desperate appeals to friends or technicians to save me from oblivion.
I still don’t...
Black Sun Rising: Publication
- June 03, 2020
- by
- Matt
“One of the great pleasures of writing historical fiction is the opportunity it provides to step back in time and engage imaginatively with a period that appears to be completely different from your own. This appeal has never been motivated, for me at least, by escapism. Because the past may indeed be another country, but...
Writing and Terror: Peter Herman’s Unspeakable
- August 08, 2019
- by
- Matt
From the so-called ‘anarchist terror’ of the late 19th century to al Qaeda and Islamic State, the history of terrorism is filled with episodes in which governments have overreacted to terrorist violence. Emergency antiterrorist legislation, military tribunals, wars and quasi-militarisation, extra-legal procedures, torture, administrative detention, national security hysteria – all these responses have been repeated...
Ahmet Altan’s Freedom Song
- August 04, 2019
- by
- Matt
There have been many times in my life, particularly during these last few years, when I have doubted my vocation as a writer. Faced with the rise of populism, ‘post-truth’ politics, churnalism, nationalist demagoguery, and the shallowness and hysteria that so often underpins 21st century politics, it’s tempting in one’s more despondent moments to conclude...
The Savage Frontier: Page 99 Test
- January 17, 2019
- by
- Matt
Marshal Zeringue’s Campaign for the American Reader blog has a fun exercise called ‘ the Page 99 test.’ Following Ford Madox Ford’s dictum ‘ Open the book at page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you,’ it invites writers to talk about page 99 in one of their...
What I’m Reading: Blog Piece
- January 15, 2019
- by
- Matt
When I’m writing non-fiction, my reading tends be dominated by the subject in hand. I try to read obsessively on whatever project i’m writing about so that I’m completely filled up by it. When I’m in between books, as I am now, I try to read more freely, either catching up on books I’ve been...
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