As I’m planning to attend MIF’s Arts and Politics Debate at the Town Hall, I’ve been looking for what the visitors to the official website of the festival had to say on the matter. I...
Upon my word, when I just arrived in Manchester, I barely saw any runners in the street. These days, and especially this spring, the city is swarming with men and women of all ages and sportive appare...
This is the scene I saw at my bus stop recently. ………………………………………Early Morning at the Bus Stop. Landscape with ...
… at The Hare and Hounds today at 3pm. No doubt I’ll write about it, but at the moment you can read about the meeting here and here. The exterior of the pub can be seen on the left (many t...
I know this will probably sound totally surreal – but I wasn’t interested in soul music until I went on a placement at the BBC GMR back in February 2005. Yes, I heard names like Aretha Fra...
I remembered listening to a short talk by Slavoj Žižek on Channel 4 last year, in which he discussed (very briefly) Charlie Chaplin’s film, The Great Dictator. Although the image of a dictator w...
There must be some curse that doesn’t let me see La Belle et la Bête by Jean Cocteau. Every time it’s on TV I either forget or cannot find time to watch it. Naturally, when I received an e...
This text I wrote recently on the train, in Russian. It is a chapter in my reflections on Manchester, which I provisionally call ‘The City of Optimists’. Some of them I published in Russia...
Like many other people in Manchester tonight, I’ve just returned from the BBC Blogging Workshop. No winds could stop us this time, but no winds were blowing, anyway. The goal of the workshop was...
Hans Christian Andersen wrote about the storm that shifted the signboards. It looks like the winter frosts have left England more or less unscathed, whereby all signboards remained in their places. Ho...