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Oct 25, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | James Walton
Can we ever escape the past? It’s a question that has threaded its way through Andrew Miller’s fiction since Ingenious Pain, his 1997 prizewinning debut. It’s also a question that has taken a different form according to which of his two main genres he is writing in. His big historical novels (Ingenious Pain, Pure, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free) sweep through the 18th and early 19th centuries, when science was challenging the long history of religious dominance.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | James Walton
Graeme Macrae Burnet is best known for two novels that were both Booker-nominated — and that both pulled off the neat trick of being full of literary games and misdirections while still working as page-turners. His Bloody Project (2015) consisted of a series of documents about a 19th-century Scottish murder case that Burnet claimed in the preface to have stumbled across (rather than say, written himself); they proved so convincing that many bookshops filed the novel under true crime.
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Aug 18, 2024 | 
substack.com | James Walton
Writing and podcasting my way through our brave new world with my warrior wife and two boys from the future.
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
ca.finance.yahoo.com | James Walton
The new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has wasted no time in formally launching the National Wealth Fund (NWF), which was a key pledge in Labour’s manifesto. The fund will invest £7.3bn in ‘new industries of the future’. Essentially early-stage green technology businesses - investments in ‘green' steel; in hydrogen production from electrolysis of water; in carbon capture and storage.
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May 24, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | James Walton
Self-restraint is important in the work of the Irish writer Kevin Barry. But only as something to be avoided. “We should always remember,” he has said, “that being innovative and wild and not afraid to go completely f***ing nuts on the page is what built [Ireland’s] reputation in the first half of the 20th century.” Not that he’s often seemed in danger of forgetting this himself. Certainly, his first novel, City of Bohane (2011), could scarcely have been more innovative, wild or indeed nuts.
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May 24, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | James Walton
Self-restraint is important in the work of the Irish writer Kevin Barry. But only as something to be avoided. “We should always remember,” he has said, “that being innovative and wild and not afraid to go completely f***ing nuts on the page is what built [Ireland’s] reputation in the first half of the 20th century.” Not that he’s often seemed in danger of forgetting this himself. Certainly, his first novel, City of Bohane (2011), could scarcely have been more innovative, wild or indeed nuts.
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May 11, 2024 | 
footyalmanac.com.au | James Walton
There’s a Gordon Lightfoot song goes I’m on my second cup of coffee and I still can’t face the dawn or something like that but it’s love he’s hung out on there when young now chase the days trying for delay holding on to every febrile bough a puff of cloud on a tongue of hours and the silence of rem all around this place centred before diminution half light half night half sleep bare feet in chocolate mint’s arousal catch a waft in dawn sight close it all Eos to Tithonus these days no delayed...
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Apr 3, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | James Walton
Mania opens in an alternative America of 2011 where “the last great civil rights fight” is under way. For too long, people “perceived to be less intelligent” have suffered hideous discrimination: far likelier to do badly at school and earn less. But now the “the bad old days of cognitive apartheid” are on the way out thanks to the “mental parity” movement and its conviction that “human brains are all the same”. The resulting reforms are nothing if not thorough.
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Jan 11, 2024 | 
footyalmanac.com.au | James Walton
Ginger EssenceMawson you were my heroholding to an ember inthe stubbed out ends of flinty life;flickering wraiths pilfering from smother driftconscious of your will just glowing there. Did you wake at the barking for the rest of it,how they circled in love for you,licks telling all their secretsa whimpering prayer of cold necessityin an adoring brush against leg.
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Dec 12, 2023 | 
footyalmanac.com.au | James Walton
Working Family Christmas Mary says she doesn’t know and in a way I don’t care there are lions and crosses an old man wipes foreheads of apoplexy he claims a vision wandering with the other two so baked in delirium the donkey shivers for warmth among contractions in a village excised out of three candle tiers splinters wrought by rough hands nothing had felt so good in years this exhaustion beyond fevers to make the goat milk in such a hurry the adze forgotten fortitude enough to push them...
