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His Dark Materials
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4–6 minutes·
No comments on His Dark MaterialsLal, Kim, Lat (Lal’s sister) and I met up in London last night to see the first part of Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of ‘His Dark Materials’. Naturally, in true Culture style we only managed to get to our seats in the very nick of time, not once, but twice! (it is nothing less than an…
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Self-Service
I was on my way into Marks and Spencers foodcourt today when I was stopped dead in my tracks by the sight of self-service checkouts. I know these checkouts are not uncommon in the US but I’d never seen them anywhere in this country until now. For the uninformed, self-service checkouts allow customers at shops…
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Fourth Rock
Instead of watching the Superbowl last night, I ended up catching A Life Less Ordinary, which was assuredly a better experience than seeing American Football and Janet Jackson. It’s a much more quirky comedy than I thought it would be, and could in some ways be seen as a proto-Moulin Rouge; it even has a…
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The Pile of Doom
If you wander into the home of a book-lover, you will find books everywhere, arranged neatly on shelves, lying on tables, sitting behind the toilet and stacked beside the bed. These are the books that have been read, and they enjoy a happy and fulfilled existence. There is a darker side to life in this…
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Lost in Translation
I saw Lost in Translation with a few friends this afternoon. I’ve been looking forward to seeing this film ever since I heard about it months ago, and my expectations reached soaring heights as it received universally positive reviews. I was a little worried, consequently, that even a great film would turn out to be…
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Confound you and your punctuation book!
There’s been a lot of press about Lynne Truss’ bestselling book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It’s a very quick and light read, but the book certainly deserves all the attention it’s been getting. Lynne Truss has written what is essentially a very long essay on the history and contemporary uses of punctuation, amply…
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Lyra’s Oxford
Lyra’s Oxford is more than just a short story and a collection of colourful extras. Pullman has set us a mystery, and judging by his past works, it’s going to be interesting.
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The Rules of the Game
I’ve just finished reading John Gribbin’s Science: A History, which is by all accounts a very well-written and interesting book. Gribbin could have probably done with making some of his sentences a little shorter and more readable, but other than that it’s an excellent review of science and the people who discovered it, starting from…
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Books
In what must be a record for me, I finished Robert Sawyer’s Hominids in around three hours this weekend; that’s about 30 seconds per page. I don’t normally read that quickly, but Hominids was a particularly easy read and had several sections on the science of DNA and quantum physics, both of which I am…
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Quicksilver
Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Quicksilver, arrived on my doorstep (metaphorically speaking) some time last week. Initially I thought to myself, ‘I’m a busy guy, I don’t have time to read this 900 page book in one go, as I usually do. Instead, I think I shall read it in little chunks, perhaps a reasonable hundred…
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