Here's the second in my series of miniature Beatles assemblage sculptures using found Beatles figurines. This one commemorates their first album, Please Please Me from 1963. #Beatles #AgeOfOlypmus @TitanBooks ...
According to the Times, the inventor of a robot salad maker designed to replace restaurant staff has admitted defeat because robots can’t handle avocados. Who knew humans would be saved from the rise of the robots by a Mexican fruit?! #Robots #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks...
There's a delicious story in today's London Times giving pretty conclusive evidence that the "1520" portrait of Michelangelo as painted by Sebastiano now being shown as part of a big exhibition in Britain's National Gallery was actually created in about 1959! Egg (tempera) on faces all round, I suspect ...
Here is the first of a series of cigar-box style sculptures I have begun to make, incorporating Beatles figurines I have collected over the years, many of them wonderfully bad! I got these models of the early Beatles, which are made of some kind of metal, in a shop, long since disappeared, in an alley behind Regent Street. No idea who made them, but they fit the Cavern perfectly. #Beatles #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks ...
I’ve just read Beatles ’66, The Revolutionary Year, a terrific book by Steve Turner about what changed the Beatles between December 1965 and December 1966 as they made the leap from Rubber Soul (1965) via Revolver (1966) to the extraordinary achievements of Sergeant Pepper in 1967. On Rubber Soul, Turner points out, 13 of the 14 songs were about love: but on Revolver, 9 of the 14 were about other things entirely, starting, of course, with Taxman. And then came Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields … Most of the book is...
This amazing drawing by an eighteenth century French artist called Edme Bouchardon reveals a woman who was clearly going around Paris in the reign of Louis the Fifteenth showing movies. She’s winding a barrel organ and carrying a portable projector on her back - and presumably a portable screen in the box. Here’s one of the actual projectors from that era she might be using, and another with the slides inserted. #AgeofOlympus @TitanBooks And we are talking about movies: if you slid the glass plate back and forward it did look...
I'm pleased to announce that in two months' time Titan Books will be publishing the sequel to last year's Duncan Forrester novel, The Age of Treachery. This one is called The Age of Olympus and it's set in Greece in 1946. Forrester has gone back there to retrieve the mysterious Minoan stele he came across in a cave in the Gorge of Acharius during the war, and finds himself in the run-up to the Greek civil war. A famous poet is murdered, a heroic general is implicated, and Forrester and Countess Sophie...
I've just finished an exhilarating Q & A for BAFTA with the writer, director, producers and stars of the excellent political thriller Miss Sloan, at the AMC Century City in Los Angeles. My director hero John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) gave the movie a cracking pace and Jessica Chastain and Gugu Mbatha-Raw lit up the screen as a couple of stop-at-nothing Washington lobbyists....
During my visit to San Diego's Mysterious Galaxy bookstore this weekend to promote The Age of Treachery I unwisely bought a model of Metaluna, the monster from the great 1950's sci fi movie This Island Earth. When I brought him home, however, while my back was turned he not only attacked a San Francisco cable car, but did grievous bodily harm to some of the most beloved characters from fantasy and science fiction. What would have happened to these two poor oblivious kids from Autopia if I had not intervened, I dread to...
Just had enormous fun with fellow authors helping celebrate the birthday of San Diego's excellent crime, mystery, sci fi and fantasy bookstore, Mysterious Galaxy and being interviewed by Joe Hogan for his podcasts on Geekitude.com ...
