John Madden was one of a kind, or one of three kinds maybe. One of the most successful coaches ever, the most influential television sports analyst ever and the inspiration for and voice of the first great sports video game. He was at once the personification of Oakland, coming as…
Twenty years ago, I was writing a Friday NFL column for a British magazine, and, with the Sunday schedule of games cancelled by the 9/11 attacks, I was tempted to write about terrorism. Like many with roots in the New York area, I knew people affected by the September 11…
Watching this summer’s European Championships managed to rekindle acutely my festering love/hate problem with association football, or, to give it its English diminutive, soccer.
I’ve lived in England for 44 years and I’ve…
In the dark of the early morning, Sara Lathus’ husband Sigurd kisses her on the forehead, off early for a weekend with friends at a holiday cabin. A few hours later, he leaves a voicemail on her phone while she is working, telling her he’s arrived and all is well…
Books discussed in this essay: The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer by Joel Dicker, translated by Howard Curtis (UK: MacLehose Press £20.00 ISBN9780857059208) The Perfect Lie by Jo Spain (UK: Quercus £14.99 ISBN 9781529407242)
It may have been only a coincidence that I should be asked to review two crime novels…
Why is it important that Carl Nassib came out as gay, publicly on social media, the first-ever active player in the National Football League to do so?
American football is the most violent of team sports, and thus the most macho. Its structures and ethos are militaristic, everything from terminology…
You have your high concept novels, and then you have your HIGH high concept novels, 35,000 feet high to be precise. That’s where the heart of Falling is set, on a an airliner bound from Los Angeles to New York, carrying 143 passengers, which gets hijacked.
But not in the…
Europa Blues was the fourth novel in Arne Dahl’s Intercrime series (in Swedish, it’s called A Gruppen (The A Group, or A Team if you want to be very cute) published in 2001, and in translation in 2015, by which time the first series of TV dramas adapted from the…
Kevin Jackson died this week, suddenly and unexpectedly. It was a tragic loss; he was a unique polymath in the English arts scene, of whom I was aware through his editing of Anthony Burgess’ poems and his remarkable book Schrader on Schrader, about the film writer and director. We began…
This year Easter Sunday fell on the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In the previous few days the UK, whose lingering racial problems relate to the export of empire, rather than the import of slaves, had released an inquiry commissioned by the Johnson government…
