Copy: The National, 29/10/11 >> Here’s a suitably monstrous story for Halloween. Hoxton Street Monster Supplies in London has been running for nearly a year now, selling jars of Thickest Human Snot, balls of Fang Floss and, best of all, tins of Escalating Panic to ghoulish...

Copy: The National, 27/10/11 >> When Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon broke up last week, there were plenty of distraught fans worried that it might signal the end of the band. No more songs like Sugar Kane (my favourite as a teenager – and yes, I know it’s...

Copy: The National, 26/10/11 >>On Sunday I went to the International Prize For Arabic Fiction event at Manchester Literature Festival. At which I learned that it’s not considered very PC to call it the Arabic Booker, but nevermind. The National did, so I am! Anyway, it was really...

Copy: The National 25/10/11 >>I’ll be honest, airport thrillers are not the books I usually turn to. But I’d heard lots of good reports about Peter James, and in the week when there was so much controversy about a thriller-writing chair of the Booker, it seemed a good time to...

Copy: The Observer 24/10/11 >>Some of you may have seen the interview I did with Mohammed for The National. There’s a link here, if not. And off the back of that, here’s a nice big review of the follow up to A Case Of Exploding Mangoes. Our Lady Of Alice Bhatti is, despite my...

Copy: The Stage, 18/10/2011 >>Nice to see the Royal Exchange in Manchester beginning to try out new directors rather than sticking with the tried and trusted. Polly Findlay says in the programme notes that CP Taylor’s Good, the tale of an ostensibly sensible man in Nazi Germany who...

The Booker eh? So yesterday. The next ridiculous prize to get het up about is the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall Of Fame. Still, like Julian Barnes’ Booker win, there’s actually an act on the shortlist who have been nominated multiple times before but never won: The Beastie Boys....

As a former editor of MP3 Magazine (yes, it did exist) it felt right to muse on Steve Jobs’ death in The National. If the iPod had come out a year earlier, perhaps we might have been given a stay of execution. Instead, we were trying to tell readers they really should fork out on digital...