Stories

I love ideas and stories. My first passion is for the written word and for books, but I also enjoy stories in all mediums, including films, TV, comics and computer games (especially narrative-led games and interactive fiction). I aim to engage critically and creatively with culture, and as a Christian I’m particularly interested in how culture expresses people’s different beliefs and worldviews.

Harry Potter and the Seventh Book’s Title

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows“, eh? Doesn’t give anything away, but sounds suitably ominous! Here are some of my thoughts on what will happen in the last book. Be warned, SPOILERS for the previous books (but anyone who cares will have read them all by now, I’d guess!) I’ve thought that Harry is a […]

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21 (continued)

Continuing a list of 21 things that I’m thankful for… 14. Doctor WhoI’ve waxed lyrical about Doctor Who before, and few things have shaped my imagination more. I love the collision of the fantastic and the everyday, the triumphs of ambition over budget (and occasional endearing defeats!), the sense of humour and optimism in the […]

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Of Man’s First Disobedience: Childhood and the Fall in Narnia and His Dark Materials

“I hate the Narnia books,” said Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, “and I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away”. [link] The essay I found most interesting to write last year (and got […]

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Bargain!

A few months ago, I noticed something of a bargain on Amazon.com: volume one of Absolute Sandman, collecting issues one to twenty of Neil Gaiman’s weird and wonderful The Sandman comic series in a very snazzy deluxe edition. When I say “comic”, this isn’t just some Beano effort, or well-worn tale of some superhero in […]

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My daemon

On Wednesday I finished re-reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman for the first time in quite a while, which was very enjoyable. One of the things I was discussing with my sister Becky was what daemon we’d each have. A daemon, for those of you who haven’t read the books, is part […]

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Artemis – Foul?

Rich and Sarah have both commented that Artemis Fowl isn’t as bad as all that. I’ll say now that I don’t think that Artemis Fowl is the worst book anywhere in the world across all of history. But it is one of the ones that annoyed me the most on reading it, and it embodies […]

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