If you’re like me you hate Christmases, or at least associated them with gross over-eating and or being reduced to giant earth-worm status and ending up horizontal on the bed with an extended stomach focussing on nothing more profound than digesting as quickly as possible. No matter how much I always vow to avoid such […]

I have taken a couple of days off checking the copy edit of my new novel Sphinx and escaped to Bilbao with a Basque mate. So I’m sitting here in a hotel opposite the Guggenheim museum (incredible building) writing this blog. Initially it was to get some respite from the English weather but inevitably it’s […]

The count-down to Xmas is on, yet the economic news seems to get grimmer and grimmer (as I am currently in London) this seems to be emphasised by the perennial lack of sunlight – the Big Grey – this time of year that extends from Nov to around April and, in my mind, a major […]

I went to a stimulating lecture at the London School of Economics last night that was entitled ‘Ancient Adversaries, Modern friends.’ It was a generalised (and very genteel) analysis of the relationship between the Ancient Greeks and the Persians; a relationship which covered a number of wars, invasions and massacres including the subject of the […]

28/11/08 Icy Hope In the midst of all the media bleakness that keeps bombarding us lately one piece of news really excited me. This was the discovery of large amounts of ice under the surface of Mars. Frankly it strikes me as one of the most optimistic things to hit the airwaves for months. This […]

Under the Covers. This week I got the latest incarnation of the potential book cover for the Australian edition of my new novel Sphinx (publication May 09). It’s a powerful image of a naked woman underwater (no rude bits showing) with hieroglyphs running over the top. The message it sends – sexy, haunting dangerous story […]

I have been inspired (or at least intrigued)by a wonderful article In the New Scientist(8 nov.) entitled Private life of the Brain by Douglas Fox, which is an investigation of the findings by neuroscientists that the brain appears to be more active and burn more calories doing absolutely nothing (ie daydreaming, staring vacantly out of […]

It’s been a crazy six weeks, for the world, for myself and the twisting fortunes of global capitalism. On black Tuesday I found myself marooned in Perth, the capital of Western Australia – geographically the most isolated city in the world, watching my (meagre but only) US stock portfolio go down the toilet. This was […]

What is it with String theory that makes closet physicists and fantasists like myself so gripped by it? When I say closet physicist I’m exaggerating by at least ten dimensions, which is the number of, dimensions string theorists believe all of the strings of multiverse vibrates in.  Something like that, as my dyslexia and number […]