The Country of the Blind
- December 12, 2020
- by
- Matt
I recently bought a copy of the official guide to the 1992 Seville Expo in connection with a novel that I’m currently working on. Most of it is written in the tourist-guide kitsch that you would expect to find from an exhibition that celebrated Columbus’s voyages as the beginning of an ‘age of discovery’ leading...
Project Fear: The Novel that Never Was
- July 13, 2020
- by
- Matt
All writers know that not all their ideas get off the ground. Sometimes you come up with an idea that you think has potential, but then your agent or publisher says no for all kinds of reasons that you don’t anticipate. So here’s what happened with a pitch that I failed to launch a while...
Let them eat Tim Tams
- June 19, 2020
- by
- Matt
FULL TEXT OF BORIS JOHNSON’S BIRTHDAY ADDRESS
Good afternoon folks. I know this pandemic thingie has been an unprecedented challenge for all of us, but I think we can all agree that my government has handled it remarkably well. The figures speak for themselves. Only 42,288 dead – 64,000 excess deaths if you believe the Office...
No Deal: All the Demons are Here
- August 19, 2019
- by
- Matt
There was a time when Halloween or All Hallows Eve was not much celebrated in the UK. Now children up and down the country merrily celebrate the liminal point where the boundaries between the living and the dead dissolve, where witches, ghosts and spirits briefly walk the earth, when ‘Halloween wraps fear in innocence’ in...
Lexit: the Disaster Utopia
- March 21, 2019
- by
- Matt
There is in every society , and at every historical period, a yearning for collapse and calamity – or at least a fascination with these possibilities. Our fascination with things falling apart is sometimes based on a vague awareness that the prospect of disaster is never as far away as we think. But there is...
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