May Day 2016: Zeit fur mehr Solidaritat*.

There was me, just 24 hours ago, walking through the Tiergarten in Berlin and coming towards the Brandenburg Gate. Cruelly, The Wall ran just to the west of the Gate, separating it from the Reichstag a few hundred yards away. Now the line of the despised Wall is...

Judge a book by its cover.

I was at my Stranger Than Fiction writers’ group the other evening, in the pub, of course. Some people say that non-fiction writers must be boring, but I don’t think that’s true at all. I just wouldn’t go if it was true. Anyway, this month we...

Easter 2016

Just finished – it’s never actually finalised till you sign off and it goes a publisher – my chapter on Trainspotting the book; it’s the longest chapter in my book. Long ago I realised that the ending of Trainspotting is more than a tribute to...

The first paragraph.

Today’s the day! Twenty years since Trainspotting the film premiered. Here’s the opening paragraph of my chapter on the film: On February 23rd, 1996, Trainspotting the film was premiered. The speed of developments since the launch and that daring, insolent...

23 February 1996

Nice to be in the forefront. Edinburgh Central Library kindly invited me to give the talk Trainspotting at Twenty a week ahead of the anniversary of the launch of the film. Got a nice review: apparently I educate as effortlessly as I entertain, for example, which was...