Anybody who came here looking for my annual best songs of the year blog posts will, I’m afraid, be disappointed. The best of year compilations that I put together with my partner, Sue, who died in June, won’t be carrying on. I might do a playlist this year, and I might write about it. Or I might not. Everything, as they say, is still up in the air, and I shan’t begin to make any long term decisions until the summer, after I return from my long-delayed fellowship in the Ransom Center, Austin, where I will conclude research on my novel about Graham Greene’s four months in Nottingham, which I hope to publish in late 2025. In the meantime, if you’re interested in my current…

My partner Sue died five weeks ago today. I’m not ready to write about her at length – I’ll be writing the introduction to her final collection of poetry, What to do Next, which she completed in April, when I feel up to it. However I know that people will come to this website looking for information, so here’s some. Our dear friend David Almond has written Sue’s obituary for The Guardian, and done a beautiful job. Thanks also to Graham Lester George, who snapped the accompanying photo, which captures Sue so well, while we were chatting in our garden not so very long ago. There have been an overwhelming number of tributes on facebook and twitter, capturing what a huge influence Sue had on…

Martin Amis was the only contemporary novelist that my late friend Stanley Middleton kept up with. I tuned in with ‘Other People’ and greatly enjoyed ‘Money’, went off him with ‘London Fields’ but really liked ‘The Information’. I didn’t get on with ‘Night Train’ or ‘Time’s Arrow’ (a gimmick that worked when I first read it as a short story but didn’t at novella length). I decided to give up on him after the execrable ‘Yellow Dog’ but Stan persuaded me to read ‘House of Meetings’ and it was really good. I avoided ‘Lionel Asbo’ as, regardless of his much imitated yet unique high style, it looked dreadful. Much of the non-fiction, of course, is terrific, though the auto-fiction in his final ‘novel’, Inside Story,…

Jenny Luithlen, who was my agent for more than thirty years, died the Sunday before last, aged 80, after a long illness. She specialised in Children’s and Young Adult Fiction, with a warm but insightful eye, taking no nonsense from publishers or her authors, most of whom viewed her with affectionate respect. Born in Ipswich, where her father was stationed during the war, Jenny worked for the publishers Hodder and Stoughton for 22 years before forming The Luithlen Agency in 1986. Her clients including the pony-story writing sisters Josephine and Christine Pullein-Thompson, taboo-breaking YA novelist Robert Swindells, Pete Johnson and Alison Prince. Jenny and Lutz’s daughter, Penny, joined the agency after graduating, soon bringing on board her former school-mate, prize winning author Bali Rai, and…

Another Post review that I haven’t got round to putting up here before, maybe because the gig was… underwhelming. I first saw Roger McGuinn playing with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bob Dylan back in 1987, when I’d already been a huge fan for half my life. Saw him again in Sheffield, then Newark, doing versions of the show reviewed below. This was his last UK tour. Nine years on, now aged eighty, McGuinn is still touring the same show, in stark contrast to Bob Dylan, 81, whose shows have changed enormously in the fourteen times I’ve seen him since 1978. Still, like Donovan in the previous review, Roger’s more than earned the right to earn a crust in whatever way he wants. His…