“We comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted”: an interview with David Walsh
“7 X TdF champ.” Lance Armstrong’s Twitter bio bears none of the signs of contrition one might expect from an exposed elite sportsman. Despite world outrage when proof of his drug-cheating was uncovered, Armstrong’s crimes seem to have dipped in significance, and his blatantly incorrect clai
“An artist is just a regular person”: An Interview with Koki Tanaka
Koki Tanaka is perhaps the contemporary art world’s quietest radical: a man who, since being selected as Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year in 2015, has proceeded to gently undermine the very concept of ‘the artist’ in favour of encouraging collective action and historical re
“I call myself an artist that writes with poetry”: An Interview with Robert Montgomery
I pick up the phone to Robert Montgomery and start speaking in the same manner as I would to someone I have known for years. ‘Hey, how are you? Have you had a really busy week?’ I ask him, rather abruptly. He humours me, and decides to talk me through his schedule that week. ‘I’ve […]
Victoria Viatorum
I first met Maria on Friday. She stood in the street and talked at me in hurried Greek, and then when I didn’t reply, accused me of ignoring her. ‘You speak Greek! I heard you at the kiosk.’ Being ignored was a problem that she seemed to face a lot, dressed in a cast-off T-shirt, […]
Body of Evidence
She had a tape recording. In it, his voice was muffled, slurred from a night of heavy drinking, and at times inaudible from the rustling of the coat pocket in which she’d hidden the phone during their last conversation together. In it, her voice was noncommittal, quiet, deferential, almost apologe
Whippersnapper
You called the dog Whippersnapper because you could not remember its name. You were friends, allies of sorts, with your illicit trades under the tabletop: a corner of your cake slice exchanged for a wag of the dog’s tail or a stroke of its black head for a friendly grin. But you could not even [&h
Reclaiming the temple: Orthorexia and me
Disordered eating is not something I ever thought I might be susceptible to. I upheld misguided, but common, prejudices about eating disorders, especially anorexia, which I associated with teenage girls – provoked by the trends and standards in popular visual culture – attempting to reme
“Stop right now, if you can”: Interview with Clive James
Clive James is an Australian critic, poet, novelist and memoirist, best known for his television reviews and the autobiographical series ‘Unreliable Memoirs’. One of the most distinctive wits of the last century, he once described Barbara Cartland’s heavily-mascaraed eyes as resembling “two
‘Prophesy, Darkness, Play’: An Interview with Max Porter
“A is to B what C is to A plus B less C. Lovely.” This is the family dynamic of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter’s debut novel, a slim book ostensibly about the “grief” of its title. Yet things are not quite as they seem: a dead mum has been replaced by […]