A Typical London Argument

The altercation, as transcribed exactly by your correspondent, with neither editing, censor nor commentary, occurred between three persons at the Docklands Light Rail station in Shadwell, a district in the Borough of Tower Hamlets, East London. It is the belief of the writer that what follows is the direct realisation and representational analogue to those most…

What we did at the oyster festival 

One of the upsides to spending my weekends and summer holidays washing pots and dishes in a seafood restaurant on the Irish Coast as a teenager was that I was able to sample and acquire a taste for a wide range of strange and exotic foods whose very mention – almost without exception – induced…

One for the poets

In the closing chapter of Augustus by John Williams, a novel I have just finished reading for the second time, I noticed yet another passage that I criminally overlooked on the first read. This quote appears in a letter written by the elderly and reflective emperor Octavius Caesar, to his friend, the historian and philosopher,…