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Murdering the ratings: Why Jeffery Dahmer got two hit TV shows
“The only way I’ll ever get a television series made about me is if I become a serial killer,” I told my wife sarcastically, as we started watching a new Netflix show “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffery...
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Bidding adieu to the great Inspector Morse (and the greatest ending to a TV...
Near the end of the final episode of Inspector Morse, we find the great British detective sitting outside an Oxford pub with his faithful sidekick Lewis drinking a beer despite strict doctors orders....
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Booze, sex and philosophy from the gutter: Reading Charles Bukowski’s ‘Women’
“I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive on its own terms,” says Henry ‘Hank’ Chinaski the fictional alter-ego of legendary boozehound writer and “laureate of American lowlife” (as Time...
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Exquisite prose: reading ‘A Single Man’ and ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’ by...
If there was a poll of the finest writers of the 20th Century, surely Christopher Isherwood would be near the very top of that list. Over the last few months I’ve had the pleasure of reading three of...
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Laughter, banality and the elephant in the room: reading Billy Connolly’s...
By strange coincidence, the day I picked up a copy of Billy Connolly’s autobiography “Windswept & Interesting” I saw on social media that the “Big Yin” had just turned 80. It was quite a milestone...
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The horror and futility of war: Reading ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’
Before watching the award-winning Netflix movie ‘All Quiet on the Western Front‘ I decided to first read the famous book by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, which was published in 1929. There’d...
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Fighting the apartheid machine: reading Andre Brink’s classic ‘A Dry White...
Like the hero of his novel in ‘A Dry White Season’, Ben Du Toit, the late South African novelist Andre Brink was considered a “veraaier” (traitor) by his own Afrikaaner people by taking the side of...
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Turning 50: The London memoirs of a weed-smoking vagabond and his flat above...
In an effort to preserve memories as I approach the big Five Oh, I am writing things down, starting with some reminisces about my London years. For most of the four years I lived and worked in the UK...
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Kafka-esque, but not his best: Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘When We Were Orphans’
It was both refreshing and a relief to read that even a great writer like Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize, did not think that highly of his strange detective novel...
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A decade of newspaper writing: a look back over the years
When I was unexpectedly offered a job at The Australian Financial Review in July 2013 I jumped at the opportunity to write for the country’s top business newspaper. Alongside this excitement, I also...
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