In Search Of The British Columbo (7): Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased) [aka My...
Have you ever seen the old noir film DOA? It’s from 1950, and opens with probably one of the cleverest openings in cinema. The protagonist would like to report a murder: his own. But what if he had...
View ArticleIn Search Of The British Columbo: Intermission
The search is starting to get difficult. Not because I’m running out of British detective series, quite the reverse: there’s too many of them and I don’t have a mountain of available time. So far, I’ve...
View ArticleIn Search Of The British Columbo (8): A Touch Of Frost
That was a tough clue, wasn’t it? “Alice Where Are Thou” – about President Roosevelt’s daughter. Could that be a clue? A detective named Alice? “A clue so large…” was a quote from Poirot – could it be...
View ArticleIn Search Of The British Columbo (9): The Avengers
image: signs unique. Click to buy it as a fridge magnet from them. Hope they don’t mind me borrowing it…In October, 11 missing episodes of “Doctor Who” were found in Nigeria. I mention this not in...
View ArticleIn Search Of The British Columbo (10): Prime Suspect
Of course, you all got the clue in the last one, right? You know, “Deep Thought”? The computer from “The HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”. Played, in the 2005 film, of course, by Helen Mirren. Her...
View ArticleIn Search Of The British Columbo (11): The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes
My favourite Doctor Who has always been Patrick Troughton. I don’t really know why, but he feels more Doctor-ish to me than any of them, past or present. So when “The Enemy Of The World” and “The Web...
View ArticleIn Search Of The British Columbo (interlude 2): Margaret Rutherford as Miss...
So did you get the clue from last time? You did? Oh well done you. But it’ll have to wait. You see, I was having this discussion on Twitter and suddenly I thought of another possible British Columbo....
View ArticleA letter to Foursquare
I’ve been a dedicated user of Foursquare for years. If you follow my Twitter, you’ll have suffered my tweets on it for long enough to know that and (presumably) not hate it enough to block me...
View ArticleA fly
I’ve been a bit quiet of late on this blog – for reasons that I’ll go into at a later date – but I wanted to just share a little incident that happened today. I work from home now, which means that I...
View ArticleDon’t Care
Just been through the spam pile. I like to do that manually from time to time, just for fun. “Quit your job today and earn less than you do now writing nonsense for us” – don’t care. “Your SEO isn’t...
View ArticleErnest Hemingway – For Whom The Bell Tolls
I hadn’t read this one when I picked it up in Cash Converters (yes, they sell books as well). It’s hard to find English books in Lisbon, so the two choices in the shop were Dan Brown’s Deception Point...
View ArticleJack House – Murder Not Proven?
Having rattled through this in just over – ooh, 31 years – I thought I’d just quickly write about it. The reason it took me 31 years to read is simple. In 1984 the BBC adapted it into a series. I...
View ArticleRobin Neillands – The Great War Generals On The Western Front 1914-1918
Of course, we’ve all seen Blackadder Goes Forth. The Allied generals used to just throw men at things, not care how many casualties there were, and kept on doing that until… somehow, the Allies won the...
View ArticleBack…
I’m happier with the theme, although it looks a bit bland right now. I’ll fix that soon… /edit: no, sorry. Reverted.
View ArticleSteve Taylor – Making Time
I wanted to enjoy this book. I mean, I really did – the premise is really good: Why time seems to pass at different speeds and how to control it That’s the tag line on the cover. And it does sound...
View ArticleKnut Hamsun – Victoria
I won’t pretend I’m as good a writer as Knut Hamsun. I won’t even pretend I’m even one tenth as good: the man won a Nobel Prize for literature. But I’d like to leave that aside, and concentrate on the...
View ArticleThe Battle Of Hastings: 1066 by M K Lawson
There are two or three things I thought I knew about the battle of Hastings. Bear with me, because this is half remembered from primary school… First off, a bunch of French blokes all called Norman –...
View ArticleIt Can’t Happen Here – Sinclair Lewis
If you’ve never heard of Sinclair Lewis, perhaps you should. He was, in 1930, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. But that’s not why I picked this up – it was a brief Guardian...
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