Alex Connor’s latest thriller, Isle of the Dead, sees conspiracy and murder surface because of a mysterious painting. When Gaspare Reni, art collector, and Nino Bergstrom, his adopted son, are presented with Titian’s painting of sixteenth-century murderer Angelico Vespucci, they are alarmed as to what it could mean. The rumour […]

Talent isn’t something to be taken for granted. It’s amazing what can be uncovered about someone or even oneself, once you accept you’re under construction and still making progress. Combined with personality and character it stays with you, as long as you hold on to it. Not to sound arrogant, […]

When I originally got into the Daily Mail, it was sort of by accident. I never bought the newspaper itself, so thankfully, I cannot list myself as a funder of tripe in times past. It was, however, one of the unrestricted news websites I could access at the workplace I […]

The Indian-administered state of Kashmir can be described as nothing less but a Gordian knot. “The man who unties this knot will become the King of Asia” said the Greek god, Zeus. When Alexander The Great marched into Gordium, he untied the knot with his sword. The geo-political knot that […]

To paraphrase that other disastrous Labour Party ‘leader’, Neil (now Lord) Kinnock: ‘Now we have the grotesque chaos of a Labour leader – a Labour leader! – scuttling around trying to pander to a rightwing press agenda and falling flat on his face!’ Less than two years from the next general […]

Like any highly-exclusive members only club, those who want in have to fit a particularly strict criteria – in this case, it involves talent, fame, sex, excess and death. Many musical enigmas have been inducted into the legendarily infamous ’27 Club’ over the past five decades, including the likes of […]

“If you’re black, you better not show up on the street, ‘less you wanna draw the heat” (Bob Dylan, ‘Hurricane’) And sometimes you might ‘draw the heat’ using public transport, as Rosa Parks found out on a cold winter’s evening in Montgomery, Alabama back in 1955. Alabama, like all the other former […]

How does one define classical literature? In the same way that one defines classical music? Could classical be replaced with “old?” In this sense, is old being used in the pejorative? An unfortunate consequence of the age in which we live, is that everything is now in easily digestible chunks, […]