1984 has been superseded by Reality

I wrote about how the novel 1984 was Orwell’s view of how the UK was functioning in 1948 here and argued that he may have been right…
I recently read Anna Minton’s Ground Control and found that all the debates and protests about whether we are living with ‘Big Brother’ are now redundant. Most folk agree [...]

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Stalking the Unicorn

Not only is this the title for a rather entertaining yarn by Mike Resnick it is a direct reference to one of the CampQuest’s activities, well at least as part of the UK’s camp experience…
The idea is that the leaders talk about unicorns that live in the nearby forest and there’s a prize to be [...]

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1984 or should that be 1948?

yes it’s that book by George Orwell…
My rather plush copy came with a forward by Robert Harris although that had nothing to with my purchase – I simply mention it here because he claims in the forward that George originally thought that he had produced a gem of a book but by the time he [...]

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From Frankenstein to Barbarella

Just by a strange coincidence at the same time I was mostly through that tedious but famous read Frankenstein – the news broke that Newcastle and Durham’s collective University project has worked out how to manufacture sperm… As I mused on the wild silliness of that old feminist idea that men [as in the male [...]

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Anarchy is a many splendid thing, George

I have just finished Penguin’s deceptively thin volume of George Orwell’s Essays. For four-hundred and sixty-six pages it is less than half the width you would otherwise expect – add to that the small type face used and you have a substantial amount of words per penny. True, it is still a collection of selected [...]

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Girl Guide vs Boy Scout

Not that I’m trying to sound provocative to feminists [or others]…
But I’ve just finished reading ‘The Book of the Body Politic‘ by Christine de Pizan and ok, she’s wrote it in the first years of the 1400s in a France torn by war with not only itself but also the English but I find her [...]

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Raggedly missing the point…

The third and last part of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists of Radio 4’s Classic Serial has ended and with it so I find the ending of the book – I made it about two thirds of the way through it and faltered to a halt, although I will try to pick it up and finish [...]

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“It was Sarah who had destroyed his faith

for him, just as she destroyed almost everything else in his life: ’she begs us to love her…’ he wrote to Charlotte Shaw, ‘and points us to Christ, in whom, she says, is the only happiness and truth. Not that she finds happiness herself… and Christ is not a symbol but a personality, spoiled by [...]

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As the government wants

to ‘reform’ the public perception of the ‘armed services’ over here in the UK with all sorts of funny ideas including a national holiday in their honour have been touted…
[This is particularly ironic given the reason and history of the 'Bank Holidays' which were meant by the campaigner for them to give working folk a [...]

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