Awed and impressed that he has resisted the temptation to start a podcast of that name for all these years.

And not just that, they don't eat any fish even though they're by the sea and a river.

Camden hasn't had hipsters since the 70s. Angel has never had them. Dalston has been hipster-gentrifying since at least the late 90s. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

"Makes me wanna challah" from Inner City Blues by Marvin Gaye. Also (not 70s) "Little Red Courgette."

You will remember it better than me, but I'm slightly haunted by the Kingsley Amis bit - quoted in Experience? - about pulling this stuff on a doctor over the pronunciation of "libido" (which KA thought should be LIBBY-doe not li-BEE-doe, or something).

All sounds a bit dubious tbh. Could you read something less red flaggy? I think the same author did a historical novel set in North Africa which is surely not so problematic.

My concern is that if I went "Yeah I've worked with kids in a private residence (my own)", they would go "Ha ha, very funny" and then chop me up with a bone saw.

I remember thinking that combining a popular type of E reference and a Bob Marley reference in a band name was almost too Nineties of them even at the time

What's the deal with Timothy Olyphant's awesomely bitchy and peevish robot? We haven't decided. What's the horrible (yet terrific) eyeball alien going to do? We haven't decided that either.

When a famous novelist said that storytelling is about 'creating the appetite for information . . . withholding it until the right moment, and then providing it surprisingly,' he forgot to add, 'not like Alien: Earth, which doesn't resolve anything and just strings cliffhangers together.'

I don't want to alarm you but I have it on good authority that news camera crews, made callous by years of filming interviews in crime victims' homes, refer to these as "victim dados."

This is actually an unhinged bugbear of mine, now I think of it. A corollary is that you can make any old shit sound quite good if you get the rhythm and cadence right, especially if you can do it without the reader/listener noticing that's what you're doing.

A lot of shite gets talked about iambic pentameter, pro and anti, but it's amazing how many people haven't been taught how stresses/beats work. Verse in adverts especially they've usually syllable-counted but got the stresses all wrong so you'd have to say the words funny for it to work.

Also the paranoid slide from "people read highfalutin' stuff hoping it'll make them more attractive to brainy chicks/dudes" (well duh), to "that's the only reason they do it" (wait, what?), to "apart from wanting to make me feel bad about myself" (???)

Didn't that guy snog his otter or something though?

My least favourite version of this argument is the "being totally fine with who's got all the money and power but pretending to be outraged by the elitism of people who like reading old books or whatever" version (the Times & Sunday Times are v big on this for some reason)

Paperback cover design peaked at Faber and Picador in the Eighties and early Nineties, and you can measure the health of a literary culture by how far it deviates from that.