That's How The Light Gets In

The opening of Liverpool’s first free public library on 18 October 1860 was marked by a public holiday and a day of celebrations, culminating in spectacular firework displays.  Yesterday, Liverpool celebrated again: from 9:00 am to midnight, thousands poured through the doors of that same library, reopened after two years being rebuilt to a spectacular […]

In 1973, Georges Perec wrote, ‘What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front page splash, the banner headlines…The daily papers talk of everything except the daily …We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.’  Joe Moran’s book Queueing for Beginners, which I’ve just read, aims to […]

If there was one word that for us signified the month just gone, it was Pompeii.  We visited Herculaneum and Pompeii during our short Naples break, and then last week, while in London for the Charles Lloyd concert, we went to see the British Museum’s blockbuster exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum.  And […]

While we were in London for the Charles Lloyd concert, I went along to the Natural History Museum to see the exhibition of new photographs by the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. In his previous social projects (such as Workers, Migrations and Sahel) he has focussed on humanity, documenting destitution, poverty, war and repression around the […]

We used to have a caravan just outside Glyn Ceiriog, near Chirk in north Wales.  The road approaches the village winding through the beautiful valley of the Ceiriog river, and a few miles before arriving in Glyn Ceiriog you pass through the hamlet of Pontfadog. There, once, stood an oak tree, the oldest tree in […]

‘There’s a hunger that I sense in the audiences I play to today’, Charles Lloyd said in a recent interview. ‘People are searching for beauty in a world that wants to shut it out. They’re looking for peace in a world full of disturbances. They get so much stuff that’s been packaged and put in […]

Four days in Naples, and of all the images imprinted on my memory from that city of teeming alleyways and cacophonous streets, one lingers ineradicable.  I was waiting outside a shop in a narrow street echoing with the roar of motorcycles and the shouts of people passing.  Then, above the din, I heard a bird […]

I caught an early morning hydrofoil from Naples to Capri, one of the few passengers not hailing from Japan.  Back home in Liverpool, the temperature had barely edged into the teens; here, the sun shone in an azure sky and the mercury was headed for the twenties. In the day ahead, on three blissful walks […]

I’m sitting in bright sunshine on a rooftop balcony in Naples – Vesuvius looms in the distance – my injured right foot propped up a cushion (I’ve broken my ankle I later discover).  I’m reading Matthew Hollis’s account of the last years of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, when I encounter the […]

Are you going to teach me about the meaning of life? Stalker is a film about a journey to a room undertaken by three men. Possibly searching for the meaning of life. Stalker guides the other two men through the Zone towards the room, circling, weaving, never approaching the chosen destination directly.  The room may […]

You come across all kinds of stuff in the edgelands – mouldering leftovers from past endeavours as well as shiny, new hopes.  The book by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, is like that, too – a bit of a jumble, but plenty that’s interesting and unexpected. The book […]

Symbolic really: on the day that Margaret Thatcher’s death was announced, we get a letter informing us that ‘following a robust procurement process’  the GP practice at our local health centre has been acquired by a private company, SSP Health Ltd. It’s part of a massive move by a company that is rapidly taking over […]

The other day I posted about how access to the river Mersey was restricted by the Cressington and Grassendale private estates. ‘As a freeborn Englishman’, I wrote, ‘I can’t understand the idea that a private estate should have the right to deny people access to a great river’.  That provoked a fair amount of debate, […]

Built to enshrine free thinking and public access to knowledge, the John Rylands Library in Manchester is an appropriate place to see An Inventory Of Al-Mutanabbi Street, a project conceived by poet Beau Beausoleil and artist Sarah Bodman to ‘re-assemble’ the ‘inventory’ of reading material that was lost when a car bomb exploded in al-Mutanabbi […]

Music is a healing force. It has the ability to transcend boundaries, it can touch the heart directly, it can speak to a depth of the spirit where no words are needed. It is a most powerful form of communication and expression of beauty. – Charles Lloyd On 15 March, Charles Lloyd was 75, an […]

Yesterday the first day of spring, today blizzards in a north-east wind.  Winter hasn’t let go this year: we’ve been stuck with anticyclonic conditions for three weeks, and this has sucked in cold air from Scandinavia.  For a while the weather was crisp, then it turned cold, damp and murky.  Today, an Atlantic weather front […]

The Labour landslide election victory of 1945 has attained an iconic, almost mythical stature in the memory of the British left. It was the first election in which Labour gained a majority of seats, and also the first time it won a plurality of votes – another 68,767 votes and the party would have gained […]

When I picked up Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs I expected short essays on 33 selected songs.  What you get is a massive tome, clocking in at around 800 pages, that uses 33 songs – from Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ in 1939 to Green Day’s’ American Idiot’ in 2004 […]

They lived by hunting and gathering nuts, berries and seeds, moving across the tundra south of the fluctuating ice cap for tens of thousands of years, following established seasonal cycles.  Their lives were as closely intertwined with the animals they tracked as ours are with the things we buy.  Animals filled their days, providing them […]

Visiting Tate Britain last week we found that the painters and decorators were in and rooms closed – there’s a major re-hang going on that will be completed in May, with the promised result that we will be able to  follow the story of British Art chronologically from 1540 to present day. I can see […]

In London last week, we went to see Light Show at the Hayward Gallery, an exhibition that both delights the senses and stimulates the mind with questions about perception and the connections between art, science and technology. Throughout history, as the exhibition guide reminds us, artists have been fascinated by the interplay of dark and […]

‘Self-indulgent twaddle’, muttered the woman in the row behind as the credits rolled at the end of To the Wonder, Terrence Malick’s latest film, when I saw it in FACT the other day.  For good measure she added that he ‘couldn’t tell a story’.  She would certainly appreciate reading Chris Tookey’s entertaining Daily Mail review, […]

We’re still enjoying days of crisp, February blue skies, so when I had to get something from B&Q on Speke Retail Park, I decided to take our dog and walk a stretch of the Mersey estuary shore I hadn’t explored before.  Two minutes drive from the bustle of the shops and the roar of traffic […]

It’s as if a lid lifted to let in the light: days of spring sunshine and blue skies (blue sky!) have arrived to banish the rain-sodden, ‘gale-battered, winter-worn‘ sensation that’s been clinging on for what feels like months.  So when I set off with my old friend Bernie to walk the first ten mile stretch […]

This autumn 40 years will have passed since that first, bloody September 11 when the coup led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile.  That event marked the beginning of a regime that committed horrific human rights abuses for 17 years, during which an estimated 3000 people were killed […]

I don’t think of myself as Bob Dylan.  It’s like Rimbaud said, ‘I is another’. – Bob Dylan, 1985 A million books have crawled over the minutiae of Bob Dylan’s life, his words, live performances and recordings, and I have read a fair few of them.  But I do believe that Ian Bell’s Once Upon […]

This strangely mis-titled show at Somerset House includes only a handful of photographs by the great French photographer and, in a sense, isn’t really about colour either.  The connection with Cartier-Bresson is this: firstly, that he once wrote somewhat disparagingly about colour photography; and, second, that he coined the term ‘the decisive moment’. When Cartier-Bresson […]

In my previous post, writing about John Constable’s oil sketches, I noted how he would make meticulous notes of the weather conditions at the time he painted. I remarked that this reminded me of Kurt Jackson, who does exactly the same thing – often including the observation in the title of a painting, and sometimes […]

John Constable perhaps suffers from over-familiarity: countless reproductions, from postcards to biscuit tins, of The Hay Wain or Dedham Vale. Those large, highly polished oil paintings were produced for the ‘finished’ picture market of patrons and Royal Academy exhibitions and, to our modern eyes that prefer suggestion to representation, they can appear just a shade […]

It was a privilege to be at the Liverpool Phil last night to see The Heritage Blues Orchestra at one of only two dates that this astonishing new band played in the UK.  I haven’t been so totally knocked out and blown away by a new band in a long time.  The group released their […]

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. Then was […]

In London for a couple of days last week, I knew that I had to see the exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery - The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein.  The Renaissance art of Northern Europe emerged from significantly different traditions and political experiences than those that informed the art of the Italian Renaissance. This large exhibition […]

It was snowing heavily as we made our way from Highbury Corner to the Estorick Collection Gallery.  London looked different, with colours drained to monochrome whites, blacks and greys.  We were about to see an exhibition of work by the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, whose paintings and drawings are characterised by a similarly reduced palette […]

Just before it closed, I went along to see Tracing the Century: Drawing as a Catalyst for Change at Tate Liverpool, an exhibition which aims to highlight the fundamental role of drawing as a vehicle for change in modern and contemporary art.  For the average art-lover it’s a deeply puzzling assembly, not only of sketches […]

I’ve been along to the Open Eye gallery to see the small exhibition of landscapes by E Chambre Hardman that’s currently showing there. Open Eye is the appropriate place for a display of Chambre Hardman’s work – after all,without the intervention of Peter Hagerty, Open Eye’s Director at the time, Hardman’s entire photographic output would have […]

In 1841, aged just 29, Dickens was on a roll with four novels to his name. Each one had been published to ever-greater critical and popular acclaim: Pickwick, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickelby had been topped with the triumphant success of The Old Curiosity Shop.  This fabulous run came to an abrupt end with Barnaby […]

I’ve had it mind on several occasions in the past 12 months to write something about my love for the music of Mali, one of the world’s poorest countries that for two decades had been held up as a model of democratic progress in sub-Saharan Africa until last January when an armed insurgency resulted in […]

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ If you want proof of LP Hartley’s dictum, listen to the audio clip ‘Introduction to Listen With Mother’ on this page. The time is a quarter to two. This is the BBC Light Programme for mothers and children at home. Are you ready for […]

For Christmas my daughter bought me a copy of Bruce by Peter Ames Carlin, the first biography of Bruce Springsteen in 25 years to have been written with the co-operation of the singer.  Books of this genre tend towards the adulation of the dedicated fan,  notably, in Springsteen’s case, Dave Marsh’s Born to Run: The […]

He has been called by his former editor Harold Evans, ‘a conscience with a camera’ and by Henri Cartier-Bresson as ‘Goya with a camera’.  Certainly, that is how photographer Don McCullin -  whose haunting images in the 1960s and 70s helped define my generation’s perception of modern war – comes across in the stunning documentary McCullin […]

The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late. – Mrs Winterson 302 libraries (263 buildings and 39 mobiles) are currently under threat or have been closed/left council control since April 2012, out of 4612 in the UK. – Public Libraries News At the beginning of December […]

Relentless rain, dark days, bad news all over.  Savage spending cuts – with the poorest councils facing the most drastic reductions that foreshadow a wave of library, social services and leisure centre closures. The British economy heading for an unprecedented triple-dip recession and the poor bearing the brunt. Climate change taking place before our eyes.  The […]

I’ve returned to my Dickens project – reading Peter Ackroyd’s biography and breaking off to read each successive novel.  As far as The Old Curiosity Shop is concerned, like everyone I suppose, I have long been familiar with the novel’s central character Little Nell, and the story that when the last instalment of was about […]

We dawdled getting out for our Boxing Day walk so that by the time we arrived at Leasowe for a stroll along the embankment, the predicted weather front was closing in perceptibly from the southwest.  Behind us, Liverpool and the coast to the north still shimmered in the last of the morning’s sunshine, but ahead, […]

Who would have thought that the dark grey shapes in a pack of dog biscuits are derived from willow ash, a product which aids digestion and reduces flatulence?  This was just one of the fascinating insights offered by Fiona Stafford, Professor of Literature at Somerville College Oxford, in a series of Radio 3 essays last week […]

I’m currently reading The Old Curiosity Shop and, in one of those curious coincidences without which Dickens’ plots would have ground to a halt, I read the following passage shortly after hearing news that the Hillsborough families are one step closer to justice: Let moralists and philosophers say what they may, it is very questionable […]

He writes beautifully about the nature he observes on Wenlock Edge: Paul Evans is a nature writer, radio broadcaster, university lecturer and self-styled ‘wanderer of woods’. His pieces appear occasionally in the Country Diary column of the Guardian.  Today, his seasonal observation is entitled ‘The blood-red brilliance, mystery and melancholy of the hawthorn’: Full of […]

On a crisp December morning we returned to one of our favourite places – Formby beach, a 20 minute drive from our house in Liverpool.  We walked through the dunes, and the closer we got to the sea the more the wind whipped in, cold and bracing, off the estuary. Since we were here last, […]

These days it’s pretty near impossible to get lost.  Turn to Google maps on your mobile phone and that blinking cursor shows you exactly where you are; on city streets we’re tracked by CCTV, and by satellite virtually anywhere on the planet. But who wants to be lost? Well, Rebecca Solnit has written an exquisite […]

To someone who grew up when the hit parade and radio playlists were experienced in common by everyone, the fragmentation of the music scene in recent decades can seem depressing. Music is no longer something enjoyed in common: instead, jostled next to each other on bus or tube but sealed inside our headphones we listen […]