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“The French Revolution aroused and then disappointed Wordsworth, causing him to seek consolation in universal nature; it made Byron a rebel, and Southey a laureate; but it gave birth to Shelley. And the chief effect of the revolution on English life and thought is to be sought in literature rather than in politics. The great wave that broke over Europe in the roar of the Napoleonic wars spent its strength in vain on the political structure of these islands, but the air was long salt with its spray. And the poems of Shelley, if it be not too fanciful

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UPDATE 4/3/10: Newspaper Club won!

Ten days ago, Newspaper Club asked me to make something to go in the Design Museum, where they’ve been nominated in the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year awards. They wanted a one-pager to give away to visitors, and I’d suggested a map for a walk starting at the Design Museum and going… somewhere…

Accordingly, I took myself to Bermondsey the following weekend, and did what I always do when I have a nose for something but little notion of the quarry. Accompanied by Rimbaud – borrowed from the London…

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I’m pleased to announce that Artists’ eBooks, a project first mooted in this post a couple of months ago, is now live at www.artistsebooks.org.

eBooks, as we’ve been saying for some time, have massive potential to revolutionise not only how we read, but what we read. The incorporation of audio and video, the possibilities for curation, quotation, linking and sharing, the vast scope of low-to-no-cost distribution and the low barriers to entry should excite us all.

In particular, I’m fascinated to see how artists and writers respond to these new opportunites, platforms and technologies. It was…

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In case you don’t read Times Emit (which you obviously should), Apt just released a fun little literary app onto the web that I designed and built: The Book Seer. I wrote about it over at TE (and had a bit of a rant about book data):

It’s very simple. It’s just pulling suggestions from Amazon and LibraryThing – at the moment. I’d like to pull stuff from more places, but it’s not easy.

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Book data is hard, but it shouldn’t be. It’s also valuable, and that’s why Amazon ranks higher than most publishers for

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For a while now, I’ve been slowly reading my way through the works of Gabriel Josipovici, one of our more interesting contemporary authors, but one little known outside lit crit circles. If you haven’t had the pleasure, go pick up Moo Pak or Goldberg: Variations for a taste. His most recent book, Everything Passes (Carcanet, 2006) is perhaps his most beautiful and mysterious work to date, a short novel which affected me profoundly. Written in Josipovici’s signature spare and compressed style, it deals with life, death, and art – particularly the intentions and what the publisher calls the “ambiguous…

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