Copy: The National, November 2012 >> The common criticism of Orientalism is that it’s an embarrassing, demeaning colonialist view of “the east”, with all its exotic, romanticised connotations. Edward Said, whose books are widely regarded as the authority on such...

Copy: The National, August 2012 >>I hadn’t been back to the Edinburgh Festival since the days of covering it for Metro. What had changed? Well, The Assembly Rooms now appears to have a Jamie Oliver restaurant on the ground floor, and the rest of the building has been completely...

Copy: Vision May 2012 >> A hands-free umbrella, or a teddy bear with wi-fi connectivity might sound like the work of a wacky inventor, but the International Exhibition of Inventions, held in Geneva every April, is serious business. I can see the wi-fi teddy bear working incidentally;...

Copy: Creative Times 28/02/12 >> What pushed the Halle Orchestra, The Lowry and The Royal Exchange – three of Greater Manchester’s best arts organisations – together for the forthcoming production of Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town? In this piece I wrote for...

Copy: The National 22/01/2012 >> When I spoke to Richard Davenport-Hines about his new book Titanic Lives, we had a long conversation about Julian Fellowes’s success with Downton Abbey. He’s lent kind words on the front of Richard’s book, which, seeing as...

Copy: The National 12/01/12 >> Really enjoyed Great Expectations on the BBC over the Christmas break, not least because I was intrigued to see how they decided to end it. Would they go with Dickens’ original, or the revised, ‘happier’ version, or their own? In the end...

Copy: Monocle December edition >> When I started out as a videogame journalist back in the late 1990s, I probably wouldn’t have predicted that 13 years later I would be travelling to the factory which makes the iconic black cab. In Coventry. But this was where Tyler Brûlé’s...

Copy: Creative Times 08/11/2011 >> I spotted a retro videogaming night in the Lass O’Gowrie pub in Manchester recently. A good idea – but an event called Get Into Gaming takes the notion of social videogaming one step further. Also in a pub, this time in Leeds, the idea is to...