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IT’S baffling: why marketing people spend so much on campaigns doomed to miss the target. So much time, brainpower, effort and materials wasted. To say nothing of the waste incurred in printing and distribution. Plus the waste of so much money. Wasted not only by the marketers themselves but also by the poor sods who pay for these useless campaigns. Mountains of junk mail, so much of which ends up as litter. Discarded as unwanted and unread. Maybe the mere act of designing and printing this multi-coloured mass of pleas to buy (or sell) is considered sufficient. It’s akin to… Continue reading

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SUDDENLY I am delving into my memory bank, reliving how it was to take that nerve-racking walk from West to East across Berlin’s no-man’s-land of Checkpoint Charlie. An instant recall sparked after inexplicably waiting two decades to open a book fully intended to be read when it made its spectacular debut in 2003. That’s how it was with me and  Anna Funder’s Stasiland. Launched to an avalanche of plaudits at the start of the century, it stayed on the best-seller list for close to two years. But only recently has it made its way to my bedside pile, the result… Continue reading