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Latest journalism
MOOMINS ARE 65
Publication: The Times : Books
Around the end of the Second World War Tove Jansson began to publish her Moomin books. Sixty five years later there is a theme park, a franchise, merchandise, and new movies.
The appeal of the Moomins in book form - written and drawn by Jansson - is very different to any of the movies or multi-media hybrids. The books are deeply eccentric, and they quietly challenge every aspect of bourgeois life, while placing themselves in the centre of it.
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Sex Review - CITY OF SIN
Publication: The Times : Books
In 2003 Belle de Jour began her blog, Diary of a London Call Girl. For six years no one discovered her identity - only disclosed when Belle was threatened with exposure by the Daily Mail.
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The Jane Campion interview
Publication: Other Articles
We're in a restaurant eating oysters. Jane Campion says to me, 'What I am trying to do is to keep space for the unknown.'
Tall, healthy, with great presence, and a solid hold on reality, Jane Campion is a believer in energetic emptiness - maybe it's her yoga training that keeps her mind as well as her body supple.
'The unknown is frightening. If you spend all your time in front of the TV or on the computer, you can avoid your mind.'
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Once upon a Shop
Publication: Observer
I opened my first fruit and veg shop in Spitalfields in 1805...
At least that is how it feels to me because my 1790's tiny London townhouse plus shop started selling Kent cabbages and Irish potatoes during the Napoleonic Wars and the year of the Battle of Trafalgar. While Nelson was gunning the French, we were selling onions the size of cannonballs.
My shop is right opposite Spitalfields Market, now full of chic shops and funky stalls, but formally the fruit and veg market for London, just as Covent Garden was the flower market, Smithfield the meat market, and Billingsgate, the fishmarket.
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Manon Lescaut
Publication: The Times
Punk band Good Charlotte's hit - Girls Don't Like Boys, Girls like Cars and Money, isn't an operatic aria but it is yet another riff on the old theme of women as gold- diggers and chancers, heart-breakers who are careless with money and fickle in love.
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