The author of this memoir thought he was walking the Camino alone until, on the evening of the 4th of September 2017, a clairvoyant hospitelera told him someone was walking with him. It’s the son who killed himself 26 years earlier. After this revelation the pilgrimage to Santiago becomes a walk into a mirror: the further they walk onwards together, the deeper they return to the past. In this way their family’s bohemian life is laid unsparingly bare until, at journey’s end, at Finisterre, ...

Human memory is not a flawless video recorder; it is a highly suggestible, pattern-seeking engine that is incredibly easy to hack. The most elegant and terrifying proof of this is the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Paradigm. In this psychological experiment, a researcher reads a list of related words: "bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, blanket." Later, when asked to recall the list, the vast majority of subjects will confidently swear they heard the word "sleep." They did not. The brain's se...

There is Britain before 1965 and Britain after 1965 - and they are not the same thing.1965 was the year Britain democratised education, it was the year pop culture began to be taken as seriously as high art, the time when comedians and television shows imported the methods of modernism into their work.It was when communications across the Atlantic became instantaneous, the year when, for the first time in a century, British artists took American gallery-goers by storm. In 1...

Sean Connery's personification of secret agent James Bond invigorated Britain and its cinema, allowing a cash-strapped, morale-sapped country in decline to fancy itself still a player on the world stage. But while Bond would make Connery the first actor to command a million dollar-plus fee, the man himself was forever pouring scorn on the fantasies audiences found it increasingly hard to separate him from.Spirited, argumentative and sardonically celebratory, Christopher Bray's ...

Vibrant and candid memoirs of the late, great British character actor, Pete Postlethwaite.After training as a teacher, Pete Postlethwaite started his acting career at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre where his colleagues included Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce, Antony Sher and Julie Walters. After routine early appearances in small parts for television programmes such as THE PROFESSIONALS, Postlethwaite's first success came with the acclaimed British film DISTANT VOICES,...

101 chance meetings, juxtaposing the famous and the infamous, the artistic and the philistine, the pompous and the comical, the snobbish and the vulgar, each 1,001 words long, and with a time span stretching from the 19th century to the 21st.Life is made up of individuals meeting one another. They speak, or don’t speak. They get on, or don’t get on. They make agreements, which they either hold to or ignore. They laugh, they cry, they are excited, they are indifferent, they share se...

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKIn this endlessly stimulating investigation into ‘things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out’, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last achievements of writers, painters, athletes and musicians who’ve mattered to him throughout his life. He examines Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan’s reinventions of old songs, Beethoven’s final quartets, Jean Rhys’s ret...

Born in Thamesville, Ontario, a student at Queen’s University in Kingston in the 1930’s, and editor and later publisher of the Peterborough Examiner from the 1940s to the mid-1960s, playwright, essayist, critic, professor, and novelist Robertson Davies (1913-1995) was one of Canada’s pre-eminent literary voices for more than a half-century.Davies, with his generous beard and donnish manner, was the very epitome of the "man of letters," a term he abhorred. Best known for his Deptfor...

In 1918, the "Vigilante" newspaper claimed that the German Secret Service held a book containing the names of 47,000 British establishment members who were sexual perverts. It was claimed Britain was losing the war because the Germans were blackmailing these figures and thereby sapping the country's strength. The "Vigilante" was exploiting popular belief that Britain had become a decadent state still in thrall to the immoral cult of Oscar Wilde. The extreme right wing politics of the newsp...

From his no-frills childhood in the icy wastes of Minnesota, to some of the hottest water Hollywood had to offer, via the cutting edge of '60s and '70s counter-culture in New York, LA and London, Terry Gilliam's life has been as vivid and unorthodox as one of his films.Telling his story for the first time, the director of Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - not to mention co-fou...

Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun,looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him. A photograph from the war, is also a photograph of the way the war will be remembered. It is a photograph of the future,of the future's view of the past.Geoff Dyer's classic book is an original and personal meditation upon war and remembrance. It weaves a network of myth and memory, photos and films, poetry and scu...

The Myth of the Blitz was nurtured at every level of society. It rested upon the assumed invincibility of an island race distinguished by good humour, understatement and the ability to pluck victory from the jaws of defeat by team work, improvisation and muddling through.In fact, in many ways, the Blitz was not like that. Sixty-thousand people were conscientious objectors; a quarter of London's population fled to the country; Churchill and the royal family were booed while touring ...