Introducing DI Garibaldi

DI Garibaldi is the non-driving, country-music loving, poetry-quoting detective who makes his fictional debut in The Final Round . How did I create him? Where did he come from? Strangely, the first thing that came was the name – Garibaldi. That’s Garibaldi as in the biscuit and as in the key figure in the unification … Read more

Hanging out on Hydra with Leonard Cohen – Polly Samson’s ‘A Theatre for Dreamers’

  I read ‘A Theatre for Dreamers’ in a couple of sittings, becoming so immersed in its sense of place and time that I almost forgot about the current state of the world. It may have helped that the novel is set in Hydra, a place to which I feel a strong emotional connection, and … Read more

Nick Hornby’s ‘State of The Union’ and The Guardian Crossword

I started watching Nick Hornby’s State of the Union determined to follow the advice of Lucy Mangan in her five-star Guardian review and not binge it all in one sitting.  I failed. Ten ten-minute dramas and  I wolfed the whole lot down without getting up from the table.  I’m sure short-form comedy isn’t meant to … Read more

What I don’t get about Sally Rooney’s Normal People

On the second page of Sally Rooney’s universally acclaimed, Booker- longlisted novel is the following paragraph: ‘He puts his hands in his pockets and suppresses an irritable sigh, but suppresses it with an audible intake of breath, so that it still sounds like a sigh.’ What? I get the hand in the pockets bit, but … Read more