#matt-wells

#matt-wells

Graham Greene announced that he was resigning from MI6. Kim Philby, his chief in Section V, MI6's counterespionage arm, blinked. Greene had played his part in tending the illusion.

In Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, wakes up in space with no memory of how he got there, highlighting the film's intriguing premise.

My mother bought me Stanley Bagshaw and the Short-sighted Football Trainer by Bob Wilson. I grew up thinking he was the same Bob Wilson who played in goal for Arsenal and presented sport on ITV.

"I try not to think about it at all," he explains. The reason, according to Weir, is that the two mediums are just so different.

In September 2015, Gayle Newland stood trial accused of sex by deception. It was alleged that she created an online identity as a man and used this character, Kye Fortune, to lure another woman into a sexual relationship, which was consummated repeatedly with the assistance of a blindfold and a prosthetic penis. The woman believed she was having sex with Kye until one day her ring caught on his hat and she felt long hair.

When I first heard of Heated Rivalry, I didn't think much about it. The words Canadian ice-hockey TV series slid into my brain and slipped right back out. But a week later, approximately everyone I'd ever met wanted to talk about it. People kept telling me that it was fun, sweet, and addicting. Most of all, they emphasized that it was really smutty. Every recommendation seemed to come with a warning to not watch with my parents.

What, you wonder, could possibly have prompted the powers that be to commission an adaptation of a postwar allegory that throws into dreadful relief the impulse to tyranny, the fragility of democracy and the brittleness of our veneer of civilisation in this shining year of 2026? We may never know. Did I mention it takes place on an island in which all normal social rules no longer apply and the inhabitants are protected from any punishment or consequence, no matter what appetites emerge?

This is a shame, because his best work belongs with the greats of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. Summer of Night is a tighter, more satisfying version of Stephen King's It. Carrion Comfort is a brick-sized epic about psychic vampires that reads as breezily as a trade paperback. The Terror, which inspired the well-regarded show, is for its first three-quarters a brilliant and non-supernatural speculative take on a real doomed Arctic expedition.

cardiganed grandmothers eating roadside picnics beside Morris Minors, pale men sunbathing in shoes and socks on stripy deckchairs, Raleigh Choppers and caged budgerigars and faux leather pouffes I feel a wave of what can't properly be called nostalgia, because the last thing I'd want is to return to that age and those places where I was often profoundly unhappy and from which I'd have been desperate to escape if escape had been a possibility.

As the trophy takes the form of an elusive UFO, Corey Fah an outsider unfamiliar with the baffling inner workings of the system is unable to collect or even confirm the award. Waidner has said that the novel was partly inspired by the experience of winning the Goldsmiths prize for their previous work Sterling Karat Gold, and by the ephemeral nature of success, with its unfamiliar contexts of social power and opportunity.

What is available is the daydream-a limitless realm of freedom. In this other world, one might be famous or rich, finally catch the attention of their beloved, or simply sit on a beach as a waiter brings them cocktails. They might fly or speak to animals, heroically save a child, tell off their boss with no consequences, win the Super Bowl at the whistle, or travel to another continent, planet, or time period. No one can stop them; no one can even object.

Sophia Stewart poses a choice that many biographers struggle with: "what to do with the boring bits."

A great demolition is also an act of creation, so long as its execution is bold and impressive enough, so long as it clears out the dead wood and opens up the terrain. It's the ethos that links Pablo Picasso to 1970s punk, Shiva the Destroyer to the anarchist hero of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Rip it up and start again. Or rip it up for the pure thrill of the ripping.

When I came across the idea for this novel a few years ago, I knew it was bigger in scope than anything I'd done before and I accepted that the research alone would be more demanding than anything I'd tackled in the past. When I finally sat down to write Adam and Eve I also realised, by the end of the first draft, that this was going to be my final novel,

After finding this seam of gold, miner Michael dreams that his son will be able to go to school, rather than join the other children who work in the mine, like blind, bald rodents unearthing themselves in search of scraps of candlelight. In the novel, which won the 2023 Betty Trask prize, everything closes in on Michael: lungs clog, tunnels collapse, horse-drawn narrowboats are attacked by robbers in the sooty dusk. It's a vivid reminder of the cost, in bodily suffering, of resource extraction.

The extended footage of Welsh in conversation is certainly engaging, as he discusses his writing and the movies it created, and his own youth in Edinburgh. Some of the rest of the interviewees aren't quite so gripping, however, and the film is padded out with a fair bit of redundant anecdotage from people on the subject of getting hilariously wasted in Irvine's company or at least his approximate vicinity.

You are leaving work, your suit still damp from the morning's downpour, the skin on your palms peeling. You are clutching two supermarket bags, tins of cream soup and tuna knocking against one another. The rain is hard and your anorak is cheap. You are on your way to Stockbridge, to your parents' house, which only your father inhabits now that your mother is gone.

Following some of the arguments in Ernest Becker's 1973 study The Denial of Death, he proposes that such crises are at least partly the result of the western reluctance to face mortality. In Britain, we eschew open coffins, for instance. When our relatives die, as my mother did two years ago, they die in a hospital rather than at home. We can hardly even bring ourselves to say die, preferring euphemisms such as pass away.