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Nightshade by Annalena McAfee
Eve Laing is an artist who works in her London studio on works based around very accurate reproductions of flowers. But she is perhaps most famous as the muse of another painter, and for moving in the same circles in the sixties and seventies as a number of other more successful artists. She did find…
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The Chateau by Catherine Cooper
The Chateau is the new thriller from Catherine Cooper, who previously wrote the very popular The Chalet. This is basically more of the same, and it’s a perfect summer read. We open at a fabulous Halloween party that’s taking place in a picture perfect French chateau somewhere in France. But there’s a scream… and a…
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TfL’s E-Scooter Hire Trial
Earlier today, Transport for London announced the long awaited E-Scooter trial will be launching next month. From 7 June, three companies – Lime, Dott and TIER – will be allowed to offer their dockless scooters for hire to Londoners. There have been a few trials in other parts of the country, and in London there…
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Ofcom UK Podcast Survey 2021
Thanks to someone on the UK Audionetwork email group for alerting me to this data that Ofcom has recently published in tabular form on its website. Ofcom has just published the data tables for a piece of consumer research on consumer attitudes and awareness of podcasting. I suspect that Ofcom will be publishing their own…
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Who Pays For the Super League?
Unless you’ve been asleep, you will know that, at time of writing, 12 named football clubs have agreed to join something called the European Super League. Another three teams are as yet unnamed. Obviously the whole thing is a sporting farrago, which guarantees the founder members permanent places in this league regardless of how well…
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YouTube Music and Missing Songs
This weekend Promising Young Woman finally arrived in the UK, courtesy of Sky Movies. Coming laden with awards and award nominations, and written and directed by Emerald Fennell, who previously took over season two of Killing Eve, I’d been looking forward to it ever since I first saw a clip several months ago. Anyway, the…
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Social Audio – It’s Only So “Social” Right Now
For the last couple of months anyone in the audio space has heard an awful lot about Clubhouse, the Silicon Valley social audio startup. You need an invite to get in, and then you can chat in rooms with people who’ve got something to promote (Crypto, NFTs, themselves…) or listen to famous people chew the…
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Pimoroni Keybow Zoom Controller
Pimoroni makes a wonderful little package called the Keybow which comes in 3 key and 12 key options. It uses a Raspberry Pi Zero on top of which sit some LED keys (there are both clicky or quiet). You can then program the whole thing to allow you to use keyboard shortcuts to do various…
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The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox
The Absolute Book is a complex and sprawling fantasy novel of a very unusual sort. And it’s all the better for being so. To try to even describe the plot would be foolhardy, but it starts in a contemporary world, mostly in the UK, but with excursions to Canada and New Zealand, and tells the…
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Star on Disney+ is a Shallow Offering
This week Disney began its global rollout of ‘Star’ as part of its Disney+ service. In the US, Disney has a family of packages including Hulu and ESPN+, offering a package deal for all of them. But the rights situation is complicated. Although Hulu is basically owned by Disney now, it was originally a joint…
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How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates
A year or so ago I read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, which laid out in often horrific details, the kinds of things that would happen to the planet if we didn’t change our ways. Bill Gates goes for the much more practical, “So what can we do about it now?” approach. This book…
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Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
Having previously read and enjoyed Convenience Store Woman, it wasn’t a hard decision to pick up Earthlings. As with the previous novel, this is a story about someone who finds society quiet alienating. Indeed our protagonist, Nutsuki handles life initially by imagining she has magical powers. Beginning as a girl, we follow Nutsuki’s life as…
Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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Yellowface/All The Lovers In The Night
Yellowface by R F Kuang I first came across R F Kuang with last year’s very enjoyable Babel, an alternate history of the British Empire told in a world where magic exists and is controlled by an elite group of individuals. Yellowface is very different, but no less enjoyable. It’s a book about books, and…
Hadrian’s Wall
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