Author: David Barnes

So it emerges that Nick Clegg has been a Samuel Beckett fan all along. I couldn’t help wondering what an election scripted by Beckett would look like: The stage light slowly illuminates a rocky plateau. Buried in pebbles up to their necks are BROWN, CLEG and CAM. BROWN. Finished, all finished now. Old Brown’s gone

The other week I gave a lecture (the subject of which is not the subject of this blog) at the Universettee. As its name suggests, the Universettee is interested in shifting the seat of learning from the academy to the home – university to universettee. It’s a university of the comfy chair, and takes place

Hearing David Cameron’s speech at the Conservative Party conference, I felt the urge to liberate the avant-garde, existentialist poem that lay behind the surface, a hidden subtext: I want to get straight To the point. We all know What I want to talk about. Don’t get me wrong, I’m ready for that But I tell

‘If you walk with Jesus he’s going to save your soul. You gotta keep the devil Way down in the hole’. As the whole of the chattering classes emerges bereft from the last series of the American police drama The Wire (screened on BBC2 years after the original series ran in the States), it’s worth

Apparently there are moves to expel Italy from the G8 group following its disastrous handling of the recent conference in L’Aquila. The story has run in parallel with the lurid pyramid of revelations around the sexual shenanigans of Silvio Berlusconi, a story which has eclipsed all other Italian news. For most commentators, such is the