This is my third miniature Beatles sculpture, which I've put together to celebrate their third album, With the Beatles. Love their little bobbling heads! #Beatles #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks ...
My author copies of the new Duncan Forrester adventure, The Age of Olympus, have now arrived and I'm going around with a huge grin on my face because they look so great! Titan Books have done a great job and Los Angeles' best independent bookstore, Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, have agreed to host the official launch at 7pm on April 20th. All welcome! PS: it's set in Greece in 1946! #AgeOfOlympus #Book Soup @TitanBooks...
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....
