Category Archives: Authors

Turned out nice again

By tom | Published: 13/06/2013

The Southbank Centre invited me to create a language installation for the Festival of Neighbourhood. The site stretches from Waterloo Bridge to the London Eye, and incorporates the new Jubilee Gardens that front the old Shell complex. Language is a strong theme in this year’s summer festivities. They include the London Literary Festival, typo-graphics by [...]

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Poem on the Underground

By tim | Published: 06/06/2013

Earlier in the week I came across this notice board at Tufnell Park Tube station. It was an unexpected encounter, and rather moving. Does someone at the station regularly update the board with new words? I don’t know. I’ll check next time I visit. Spike Milligan served as a bombardier in the Royal Artillery during the [...]

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Apostrophegeddon

By tom | Published: 07/05/2013

Writing is not about rules, but communicating ideas. Any company that rejects a job application because of a misplaced apostrophe is barking up the wrong tree. The most original thinkers I work with struggle to tie their shoelaces.

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A Christmas Cracker

By 66000 | Published: 09/12/2012

Rochester House, home for The Story Museum, was a magnet for roving Tale Tellers, Yarn Spinners and Gossip Mongers who arrived from far and wide to feed off the Oxford Gyre; the storytelling energy that has made the city of dreaming spires such a Mecca for writers.

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Whale of a time

By tim | Published: 13/11/2012

Moby Dick: Big Read presents an online version of Melville’s book, with each chapter read aloud and accompanied by a painting, drawing or photograph.

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Words in the airways

By Mike | Published: 17/10/2012

From a glowing Bakelite wireless in the distant 1950s to the latest digital receiver, my ears have experienced an onslaught of millions of multi-layered words.

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Noisy perfection

By tom | Published: 26/09/2012

I am sitting in the Bodleian Library with Dr Christopher Fletcher, a Fellow of Exeter College, member of the English Faculty and Keeper of Special Collections. On the table between us is a yellowing manuscript of translucent pages inscribed with a neat copperplate script in brown ink. It is the autograph draft manuscript of The [...]

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Back to Midtown

By tim | Published: 19/07/2012

If you’re going to promote an area’s links with great writers, you have to do better than ‘The Bloomsbury Set, based in the area included Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.’ It doesn’t even make sense.

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The Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life

By tim | Published: 02/02/2012

‘In the midst of life I woke to find myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London.’ With these words the Spitalfields Life blog was born, back in August 2009.

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Comfortable among the clouds

By tim | Published: 24/01/2012

Joseph Roth’s What I Saw captures his impressions and observations as he wanders Berlin in the years between the two World Wars. He re-constructs the city before the reader’s eyes. But it’s very much his Berlin – one moment a hard reality of stone and traffic, the next a floating world of dizzying shapes and elusive symbols.

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