Nottingham Playhouse’s production of ‘Our Man In Havana’ opens tomorrow and plays Nottingham before touring. Below is an article I wrote about Greene, Nottingham and my novel ‘The Pretender’. The article (along with interesting pieces about Havana and working with Greene) can be found in the programme for the play, which I’m going to see next week. When Graham Greene arrived in Nottingham, he was an Oxford graduate, just turned 21, who wanted to be a journalist. He hoped that a brief spell as a trainee subeditor on the Nottingham Journal would stand him in good stead for a post in London. On November 1st, 1925, he moved into lodgings on Hamilton Road in Forest Fields. ‘When I read Dickens on Victorian London,’ he wrote…

I’m what you might call a very occasional journalist. I go to gigs most weeks but rarely review them. Two of my closest friends, however, write for regional newspapers. Through them, I often get plus ones (ie freebies) to shows in Nottingham or Sheffield. Last night, my Nottingham friend was indisposed. Rather than miss the sold out show by The xx, which I’d been looking forward to more and more as I grew to love their debut album, I agreed to review it myself. Here’s the review, as it appears in the Nottingham Evening Post. The xx emerged fully formed this year, with festival appearances, support slots and a self titled album that debuted in the top 40. A four-piece, they line up at the…

Yesterday I had to do some speedy reading in order to write a note for the programme to Nottingham Playhouse’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s ‘Our Man In Havana’. A few years ago Michael Eaton and I took David Lodge to what we thought was Greene’s old lodgings, Ivy House, at number 2, All Saints Terrace, near the Arboretum (bottom photo above). Here’s David’s account of the visit. However, this theory had flaws, principally because 2, All Saints Terrace has no room for a basement flat, which doesn’t fit with Greene’s account of his landlady living in one. Googling yesterday morning, I discovered that two Nottingham Greene fans have come up with a more convincing theory, that the current All Saints Terrace wasn’t so named in…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNtlGwYJCUQ] Here’s the new Eels video, which is worth bringing to your attention, if only for E’s bookshelves in it. Also, he gets to fall for Padma Lakshi (who reciprocates, which is kinda convincing, since E could be a younger version of her ex, Salman Rushdie). Pity about the ending, though. That E, he always undermines himself. Do play this in full screen, as it’s a high quality stream, and do read his autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, one of the best books I read last year (and still available in the paperback with the free demo cd that didn’t come with my hardback).

I discovered the poet John Clare in 1979, when the singer Kevin Coyne adapted his best-known poem ‘I Am’ on the wonderful ‘Dynamite Daze’ album. I bought his collected poems and read up on him. Easy to see why former mental nurse Coyne should be fascinated by a poet who spent the last 23 years of his life in Northampton’s lunatic asylum. Hard to understand why the Literature degree I was doing didn’t once mention Clare. But, for all the acclaim that he received in his day, as a labouring class or peasant poet, Clare’s modern popularity is relatively recent. The John Clare Society was only formed in 1981. Nottingham Trent University, where I teach part time, has two John Clare Lecture Theatres, but they…