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Awful, but influential. Laurie Penny has made an entire career from stealing that parenthetical flourish.

The Relentless Picnic. The current season on Thoreau/the Unabomber/lockdown is a bit of a stretch, but the early episodes once they got Trump out of their system are incredible. My favorite episode.

I used to be a take it or leave it until the first time I listened to Parsifal in one sitting. Considering that's a recommendation for how to spend four consecutive hours of your life, I'll understand if you give it a miss.

I was in my mid twenties then and am in my early forties now. Somewhere in between I became one of those people who really loves Wagner.

Jesus, I used to write like a cunt.

Faint praise, but after 16 years it's better than nothing.

Reviewed in the New Yorker. He'd probably have resented the scent of affirmation, but it's always been my favorite magazine and I'm glad to see him in there.

When I was growing up in Southampton (in the 1980s) I felt resolutely middle class, by virtue of the fact that my mum fixated on middle class signifiers like accent and behaviour when we were young, and because (as far as I was aware) we lived in a reasonably nice house in a reasonably nice part...

In case you've not seen it, Siobhan McKeown's tribute is really lovely, and a welcome contrast with all the stuff focusing on Capitalist Realism and Vampires.

Desperately sad news.

Much reading and re-reading of Asterix among my four brothers and me as kids, and still the occasional re-visit now, though the copies are mostly falling apart and the hardbacks in particular have weird blackened spines. No contest really. Am particularly fond of the jokes about learning French...

If I could overcome my disappointment from when Brighton beat southampton on Sky earlier this season, I could probably bring myself to write about them. Always thought Poyet was a fantastic player and a scorer of great goals - hope he does well as a manager.

I actually find the whole business of judging relative greatness one of the most entertaining things about football. Usually I prefer the arbitrary 'x was better than y' approach, but I'm not above arguing over FIFA rankings...

I don't know of many good ones, so I started my own www.seagullsfollowthetrawler.com Tim Vickery on the BBC is reliably good, and the rest of the BBC stable usually manage to produce one or two interesting posts per week between them; but are there any other good ones out there?

I started a new football blog called Seagulls Follow The Trawler, if anyone fancies a read. Got bored of the overwhelming laddishness of most football blogs and decided to have a go at writing my own. www.seagullsfollowthetrawler.com

http://www.underneaththebunker.com/ Anyone know who writes this? It's a fairly amusing online Borges homage involving fictitious reviews by fictitious critics of fictitious, er, fictions.

While it's laudable that Google is high-tailing out of China, I suspect at least part of it is to do with their miserable failure to challenge the local search properties there for market share. Although $350m in revenue is a big number, its actually fucking peanuts compared to the size of the...

The problem I have with describing The Savage Detectives, is that all the things I love about it - the exuberance, the unashamed romanticism, the idealisation of youthful & poetic ambition despite the inevitability of fucking up - these are all things that if someone said they were the signal...

This was the edition I got - it's a thing of beauty, isn't it?

So fucking true... 'The Savage Detectives' is easily the most compelling novel I've read in the last ten years (the only book that comes close being 'Independence Day' by Richard Ford). I'm very pleased that a copy of '2666' landed on my desk this morning...