Getting to know me…

I’ve just come across a recording I did with The Living Memory Association (TheLMA – good name, eh?) a year or so ago. As a newcomer of only forty years in Leith, it seems some folk might be interested in me, so here Barry Davidson splices my biography...

How do you like your cruelty, sir?

In the BBC1 programme to mark VJ day on Saturday evening, Japanese expansionist ambition was presented as a “bad thing”, to be resisted. Those who resisted it, in support of the status quo ante, faced great hardship and cruelty. It struck me very forcibly, however,...

American Tabloid

Good to see some active collaboration between two satirists and commentators who cut their creative teeth in the 1990s, Irvine Welsh and Bret Easton Ellis. As I say in my book, there’s little doubt that BEE’s American Psycho was an influence on IW when he...

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

Following Michael Holding’s powerful speech about taught racism before the first England v. West Indies test Match, I’m reminded of a little-known song in South Pacific (Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1949). With incipient racism running through the whole show,...