For the last twenty years I’ve been writing on art, literature, travel, and sport. As well as politics, history, and propaganda. You can find a selection of my work below.
‘Youth power had taken over; innovation, creativity, dynamism in fashion, music, art and culture all had new and exciting forms of expression. The skirts of the female presenters got shorter, and the men had brighter shirts.’ BFI
‘With the image of Cold War espionage increasingly becoming shaped by films like Dr No, and TV series like Danger Man and The Avengers, MI6 feared that campy pulp fiction would drown out the real threat of Communist subversion.’ The Spectator
‘The “public” part of public information was gradually being furloughed and replaced by the altogether less attractive concept of government information, accompanied by the attendant tendency for state failure to be blamed on dissenting opinion.’ The Critic
‘Fewer people seem to really believe politicians work for the good of us; Icke simply adds on the suggestion that they work for ‘them’.’ Tribune
‘During a crisis, what little predictive power the social sciences have tends to evaporate. Perhaps this is why we’ve seen the Covid-19 crisis compared to the four horsemen of the apocalypse.’ South China Morning Post
‘History Class is like an artefact that has travelled through time from the South East Asian front of Fukuyama’s end of history.’ LRB Blog
‘The young people look around but can’t find a way to contribute. It’s part of a very serious global issue, a global negativism.’ Tribune
‘A lot of people saw it as a very left-wing ceremony, but it is also the ceremony that showed the warmest and most appreciative view of the Monarch ever I would have thought.’ Exeunt
‘Parts of Sazan have a slightly sinister quality. Ammunition, gas masks, and old beds lie scattered around. It is as if you have stumbled across the aftermath of some terrible but unknown catastrophe.’ Air Mail
‘We have no language of human rights, there were basically no debates about human rights during the election, and the discourse around foreign workers can be quite xenophobic’’ LRB Blog
‘From Javanese batiks to Renaissance sculpture via Bengali alpana, Surrealism, ukiyo-e, Cochin murals, and medieval European cathedrals. Following the Indian polymath Rabindranath Tagore, Aung Soe pursued “freedom of mind, not slavery of taste.’ Air Mail
‘For an outsider, one of the attractive things about the magic of the sayur lodeh story is just how unmagical it is. The ingredients are a list of things that any Javanese villager is likely to have to hand.’ BBC
‘The novel Durga/Umaya centres on the premise that Freud was wrong. The real cause of the world’s woes is breast envy.’ The Tablet
‘Going into the townships at a time when racial discrimination was at its most intense [was] something that had all kinds of ramifications.’ BBC
‘In Singapore we don’t have natural disasters,” he says. “But we do live with the trauma of constant demolition.’ BBC