Of course I love this film, and one of the things I love about it is that it's a kind of British remake of The Wages of Fear. But instead of having to risk their lives transporting nitroglycerin along mountain roads in South America, the drivers have to transport gravel along the B-roads of Kent.

The final article referenced in this blog (on Stackridge and The Korgis) will link you to a really beautiful newish accoustic version of 'Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime', one of the great British pop songs of the last 50 years.

Maybe niche, but one of my main reasons for liking Gordon Brown is that while he was PM he offered Alasdair Gray a knighthood. (Which of course he turned down.)

Amazing. So for eight months somebody counted how often each political party was mentioned across all UK broadcast media. Lib Dems are near the bottom of the table with a mere 645 mentions per MP. Top of the table with (wait for it) 70,732 mentions per MP? You'll never guess ...

Installing Farage as PM would be a short-term win for British newspapers but would also bring them an existential crisis. How would they fill their outrage vacuum, and what would they put on their front pages? Readers would soon get bored of headlines saying ‘Well Played, Sir!’ and ‘Nice One, Nigel’

People say there is no goodness in the world any more, but it turns out that crypto-billionaire in Thailand really did care about improving our bin collections.

My worst experience of this was a flight from Guam to Palau one night in a tiny plane in the middle of a storm. There were two abortive take offs. Warning lights flashed everywhere. On the third try, by way of reassuring us all, the pilot announced: 'Right, fingers crossed, third time lucky ...'

Sorry to hear the dramatist Richard Cameron has died. His stage version of The Rotters' Club (produced at the Birmingham Rep in 2016) was only a minor item on his CV but it was a brilliant and imaginative adaptation, which inspired my novel Middle England by making me want to revisit the characters.

Opportunity for composers! 🎼 @nonclsscl.bsky.social is looking for 4 UK-based composers with a unique artistic voice and development potential to join nonclassical AIR (artists-in-residence) in 2026. Details here: www.nonclassical.co.uk/nonclassical...

Just had a great time talking about MR WILDER AND ME to the two gentlemen who are making this podcast. Not sure when my episode will be on - in the meantime they're working their way, film by film, through the entire Billy Wilder filmography. So far they've got to the mid-50s. Well worth a listen!

I also get a lot of these emails - but never one like this, I must say. This one is a peach.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who still believe human life holds meaning, dignity, hope and purpose, and those who’ve been to IKEA on a bank holiday.

As a public service can I advise you not to bother reading this collection of truly pathetic reasons for voting for a party whose big idea for improving life in Britain is building concentration camps. (NB includes the phrase 'rolling the dice' as is now obligatory in such pieces.)

Just went to the matinee of this and what a fantastic reading (and post-reading discussion) it was. David Edgar’s fifty-year old play turns out to be an astonishing analysis of Britain in 2026.

Spent a few hours yesterday in the biggest and poshest garden centre I’ve ever visited. As my daughter said: ‘They should put a hotel here next, then people could stay for the whole weekend and it would be like Disneyland for 65–year-olds.’

And on Google Play Books too.

A clown at a lunch counter, Reno, Nevada Thomas Hoepker, 1963

Top work.

mugger: *points gun* your money or your life me: sure thing *hands him my id* you got 2 kids and didn’t actually understand the matrix mugger: no i mean- me: *already running away* you’re late for steph’s recital

I treated myself to this for Xmas a couple of years ago, and it literally moved me to tears. I can thoroughly recommend it.

My novel BOURNVILLE is available digitally on Amazon or (for the Bezos-phobic) Kobo for £0.99 this month. An attempt to look in a serio-comic way at issues of English national identity, WW2 mythologising, Royal family worship and other things that have brought us to the state we're currently in.

Not so niche, in fact. Last week, as you may have read, more than 200 authors quit Grasset, one of France's finest publishing houses, following its takeover by billionaire Vincent Bolloré. Bolloré also owns the railway bookshop chain Relay, whose windows are now full of titles by far-right figures.

This morning's book post. The English translation of Aymeric Leroy's exhaustive history of the Canterbury scene has been a long time coming (ten years in fact), but here it finally is - all 643 pages of it!

Siri: define literary fiction.

Almost everything we argue about is a substitute for the thing we should be arguing about: the immense wealth & power of an oligarchic class, which captures governments, ruins lives and wrecks the living planet. This class redirects our rage at scapegoats. To resist its lies is to resist its power.

I suspect Benjamin Trotter has already booked his tickets for this ...

This morning I’ve seen Olly Robbins’s appearance before the select committee described as ‘box office’, while a commentator flagged up another key political moment with the words ‘bring the popcorn’. That’s one of our main problems right there.

Re: my last RT, I think we should all take a moment to reflect on how very bizarre it is that this chain of cafés came into being in Orban's Budapest.

It's a good night to read this excellent piece, on the Orban regime's network of financial support for the nationalist right in Britain. For many on the radical right, the tills are about to stop ringing. democracyforsale.substack.com/p/orbans-brits

Ha! Let’s start a crowdfunder to get him to come here and campaign for Farage in 2029.

"Art of The Deal" 🙄

Apparently this position now has to be stated, and not just assumed.

The world not screeching to a halt when the US killed more than 100 little school girls on the very first day of this "liberating war" led us exactly to this moment

This month I'm supposed to be putting the finishing touches to a quiet little novel but instead I find myself online, wondering how we got here. 'Here' being not just Trump threatening to destroy a civilisation, but American conservatives still being fine with it. Exhibit A, Megyn Kelly:

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?

He doesn’t have dementia, it’s kind of insulting to people with dementia to keep saying that. He is massively capable compared to an actual dementia sufferer, that narrative really pisses me off. He is just an awful human who has fallen upwards to the point he can break the world for everyone.

Fun fact: the Daily Telegraph quote which adorns some paperback editions of The Rotters' Club ('One of those sweeping, ambitious, yet hugely readable, moving and richly comic novels that you find all too rarely in English fiction') is from James Delingpole.

Trump just openly stating his intention to commit genocide at this point: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."

The US military has 22 sites in the UK. Every day long range US bombers are taking off here to drop bombs on Iran. This is a rogue state carrying out war crimes, and threatening more. The UK Government must grow a spine - and stop our bases being used for this war.

Whoever decided that BBC4's sublime Monday night double bill of Call My Bluff and Face The Music should be referred to as the #ComboverHour deserves a round of applause.

The fact that I've seen this film about five times but have never seen Bicycle Thieves is making me reflect on my poor life choices.

This is such sad news. I only met Glen Baxter once, at a literary festival in Montpellier. (He was hugely popular in France.) I can only say he was one of the funniest, warmest, most charming geniuses I've ever met.

Only 99p on Kindle today: my eleventh novel, the imaginatively-named Number 11. (Which, in order to achieve better sales, I should really have called What a Carve Up 2: the Return of the Winshaws.) This is the one Ken Loach read and said he wouldn't film because 'I don't really do giant spiders'.

Finding it increasingly hard to distinguish these from news updates.

Fascinating thread. An Italian friend of mine was commissioned to compose soundscapes for libraries (very low-key music/traffic noise/background chatter) because a survey showed that young users found the silence in them off-putting.

France yesterday, Italy today. It's not all bad news.

Fascinating results in the second round of the French local elections, with the extreme-right failing to win any of its significant targets once again. Paris remains socialist, and so - it seems - does Marseille. Lyon remains Green. Centre right and "republican right" candidates doing well.

Wow. In 1978 Tony Blackburn was apparently more hated than the leaders of the National Front.

I've had some pretty frustrating experiences judging prizes over the years, but this one was a delight. And I think we chose a worthy winner.

Apparently Reform voters hate out-of-touch elites but are happy to place the nation’s health care in the hands of a Cambridge divinity don.