What a beautiful thing.

Love The Lady Vanishes? Night Train to Munich? Murder on the Orient Express? Come and see ROME EXPRESS, the film which kicked off the genre. Introduced by a conversation between me and some little-known writer called Kazuo Ishiguro. Bfi Southbank, July 21st. Book here: tinyurl.com/yh2pz72b

Another digital deal on one of my books. This time it's The Proof of My Innocence, on sale at Amazon, Kobo, bookshop.org and others for 99p throughout June. It's a murder mystery set in a Britain which is drifting towards the far right. No chance of that happening in real life fortunately.

En ces temps troublés, il est bon de se dire qu’on peut toujours passer un moment (suspendu et heureux) avec @jonathancoe.bsky.social et l’Artchipel Orchestra. youtu.be/Y61LlyKy_1Q?...

Book your tickets for the Rome Express, the grand-daddy of all train films, at the BFI Southbank on 21st July. Introduced by one of the world's greatest writers. (Kazuo Ishiguro, I mean. I will also be speaking.)

Have been listening to this today on Tidal. It's an impressive, often beautiful piece. Am so impressed by how Mike puts these ambitious projects together. He's a powerhouse!

In Lessons in Harmony, novelist @jonathancoe.bsky.social reimagines the remarkable friendship between Ralph Vaughan Williams and Maurice Ravel, beginning with RVW's studies in Paris in 1907. An exploration of music, identity and artistic exchange, due to be published in November 2026.

This looks timely and fascinating.

Delighted to see that @stuartmaconie.bsky.social's prog Prom will feature Gentle Giant's On Reflection - an amazing piece of fugal writing from the great Kerry Minnear. Also that @sofasound.bsky.social will be performing. Hope it will be on TV as I left it too late to get tickets ...

Another month, another digital deal on one of my books. This time it's The Proof of My Innocence, on sale at Amazon, Kobo, bookshop.org (linked below) and others for 99p throughout June. It's a quaintly out-of-date mystery novel about the radicalisation of the British conservative movement.

Thanks to @rufustsuperfly.bsky.social and @stuartevers.bsky.social for alerting me to this pastiche. Brilliant stuff.

Book your tickets for the Rome Express, the grand-daddy of all train films, at the BFI Southbank on 21st July. Introduced by one of the world's greatest writers. (Kazuo Ishiguro, I mean. I will also be speaking.)

Very much enjoying Criminal Record on Apple TV. Peter Capaldi is especially brilliant as the saturnine, morally-ambiguous detective with his famous catchphrase ... ... 'You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.'

Film historians! Quatermass 2 is on @talkingpicturestv.bsky.social later tonight and I was wondering if this was the first film to advertise its status as a sequel by putting the number '2' in the title? Hard (for me) to think of any others until Jaws 2 in the 1970s.

New BBC Woke Bias Row as Sebastian Gorka BANNED from Blue Peter

New BBC Woke Bias Row as Kim Jong Un BANNED from Mrs Brown's Boys

New BBC Woke Bias Row as Steve Bannon BANNED from Jackanory

If we're going to insist that 'banned' means 'not invited' from now on, this story could run week after week. Nigel Farage Banned from Graham Norton Show Nigel Farage Banned from Richard Osman's House of Games Nigel Farage Banned from Question Time (Oh wait, that last one doesn't work)

About once a year I find out that someone has actually listened to this and then I get so excited that I have to repost it.

If anyone knows how to put this on Qobuz or Deezer, that would be great!

It will be another six months before LESSONS IN HARMONY, my novel about the friendship between Ravel and Vaughan Williams, is let loose upon the world. In the meantime you can do your homework by checking out this playlist, which includes nearly all the music mentioned in the novel.

Reposting for evening users and also for @vwfndn.bsky.social

So, I seem to have written yet another novel. I really don’t know how this keeps happening.

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!

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.’

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!

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.

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

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.