Murray

Good budget selection with one let-down, 12 Dec 2012

I was born a little over two decades after these guitar instrumentals from the late 1950s and early 1960s were recorded, but as a guitar player, I love this type of music. There's a good selection here, with some I know (such as those by The Shadows and Duane Eddy, and of course Tequila by The Champs), some I didn't know I knew (the wonderful Hawaiian guitar of Sleep Walk by Santo & Johnny, Hit and Miss by The John Barry Seven), and others I hadn't heard before. There's a few gimmicky tunes (Rockin' Goose, with its goose-sounding keyboard), but at least they always have tunes. (And Green Jeans is a rock'n'roll take on Greensleeves!)

One disappointment was track 30, Jefferies Rock… Read more

"There is evil in the world, and it can take many forms.", 5 Dec 2012

"For it has always been my earnest belief that even what seems utterly reliable and mundane - an ordinary woman's love for her good-looking husband and her child, for example - cannot be relied on. Nothing is ever what it seems. Some rot gnaws away at the fabric of the universe." This is the conviction of Ignatius Flood, Jesuit novitiate and "Soldier of Christ", sent to an out-of-the-way farm in rural Ireland to investigate what may have been a miracle, but could be a hint of something far darker. Falling for the beautiful Eileen, Flood becomes convinced she is a simulacrum -- "something that resembled a woman, but without a soul, though it lived and breathed and stared at me with dark,… Read more

A four-dimensional man, 12 Sep 2011

The title of this biography is, surely, not the biographer's statement of an intent to plumb the "inner man" that was J G Ballard, as Ballard himself did that at such length and in such detail that no single book could measure up to the task. Rather, I take it as a description of Ballard himself -- he was, like a character from one of his own stories ("The Subliminal Man" or "The Overloaded Man"), "The Inner Man", whose inner, imaginative life was (in the latter half, at least) far richer than his outer -- which may explain why Ballard was happy to write from a point of view always five minutes in the future while living in an old-fashioned, dusty suburban house, with a couple of old manual… Read more