I did my first (and, for about twelve years, only) radio interview with Trevor Dann on Radio Nottingham back when I was the nineteen year old editor of the Nottingham University students’ union newspaper. Next month, at Lowdham Book Festival, I’ll be belatedly returning the favour, when I introduce his talk on Nick Drake (see below). In the meantime, here’s the promised review of his fine book about Nick Drake. This appears in the first issue of Nottinghamshire Books Quarterly, out today, and appears here by permission, for those outside its circulation area. DARKER THAN THE DEEPEST SEA The Search For Nick Drake by Trevor Dann Portrait 17.99 Nick Drake means a lot to me. In 1974 I risked 50p on an anonymous white label…

I’ve been reading Douglas Coupland’s forthcoming novel JPod, in the garden during the recent hot spell. My excuse for this is that I’m doing an onstage Q and A with him at Nottingham’s Broadway on Friday June 2nd. Before that, I’m excited about hosting the first Annual Graham Greene Memorial Lecture in Nottingham on Tuesday, May 23rd at 7.30PM. David Lodge will be talking about ‘Graham Greene and the Anxiety Of Influence’, an extended version of a fascinating lecture that I’ve just read. It’s in his forthcoming book The Year Of Henry James. Tickets for this lecture, followed by a q and a, are free, and can be had by phoning 0115 8483231 if you get your skates on. The Creative Writing MA I run…

‘Resurrection Blues’ should have been an ideal play to kick off Easter weekend but we’d over enthusiastically booked our pricey Old Vic tickets before the reviews came out. By the time we got there, the critics had savaged my favourite living film director’s production of Arthur Miller’s final play. Indeed, it was about to close early. It couldn’t be as bad as the reviews said, could it? No, it was worse. The play had nothing going for it (a satire? Barely a comedy). Most of the actors were no longer taking it too seriously (Matthew Modine had a particularly embarrassing role, while Jane Adams had already jumped ship after an alleged altercation with another actor): you had to feel sorry for an embarrassed looking James…

The university term is over, even though Easter’s three weeks’ away. I’ve been fiddling about with some stories, trying to decide what novel I want to write next, and organising literary events. I’ll plug some of these on here when all the details are finalised. In the meantime, let me plug Leftlion which has an interview with me by James Walker on its site. Leftlion’s a bimonthly Nottingham free newspaper with a circulation of 40,000 and a regularly updated website. It was partly as a result of reading the review on Leftlion that I went to see William Ivory’s fine debut play, The Retirement Of Tom Stevens last week. It’s a stage play about a Christmas family reunion in Southwell, very good on men and…

I took a day off yesterday. Got a cheap train to London and spent the journey reading Michael Eaton’s excellent BFI Classic about ‘Our Friends In The North’, Peter Flannery’s brilliant 1997 TV drama series that BBC4 have just begun a repeat showing of (I rewatched the whole thing on DVD over a week last year and it holds up incredibly well). Then I wandered round the Tate Modern, soundtracking the rehung artworks with my iPod (a live orchestral ‘Atom Heart Mother’ was rather more impressive than the Whiteread white boxes, while the Dexy’s Midnight Runners worked surprisingly well with the surrealists. Bowie’s ‘Low’ didn’t quite mix with Rothko). Then a quick bit of bookshopping on the Charing Cross Road (one shop had a set…