Beat

Aliya Whiteley – The interview

I want to believe that there’s a reason, a plan, for my existence. I’d like to be the culmination of a million years of a breeding program just to make someone as amazing as me. But I’m not really amazing, and neither are you. Or maybe you are. It all depends on how you judge amazingness, I suppose. And all my novels, short stories, poems, address that issue. The calculation of amazingness.

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Why I Picked Dylan

Bob Dylan didn’t go to his audience and beg to be accepted. They found him, and when they did they found him valid, and their word of mouth spread like a cultural flash flood.

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The Good, the Bad and the Bond: a fan’s eye view of Pierce Brosnan

Will Smith, the writer, comedian and star of The Thick of It, would frequently post pictures of Pierce Brosnan on Twitter, with captions such as the following, accompanying a shot of Brosnan painting in his garden with a hat slung behind his neck: You come home to find your new gardener painting your wife in the nude. Why, I asked him, is Pierce Brosnan so brilliant? “Because he’s like a walking Rolex ad,” he said. “Because of the seriousness with which he’ll put on a cufflink or pick up a shot glass. But also because he knows exactly how cool and ludicrous he is at the same time.”

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The New Goodbye to the future of books?

The New Goodbye is a project aimed at demonstrating to publishers the potential of new formats. With the iPad now on the market, giving Apple a reading device of yet more scope, the potential is even greater. What I personally want to show, by using the app as a platform to secure a publishing deal, is that, done the right way, these formats can create demand for a printed book, and will not cannibalise print sales as most publishers fear.

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Buggyboot or bust – mumpreneurs on the block

“But we have created something, we have produced it and we’re involved in the warehousing, distribution, logistics, marketing and costing. We lift boxes, fix problems, attend trade fairs. We do absolutely everything. I don’t know how we’ve done it but the pair of us are hugely resilient, we are persistent, probably a bit stubborn, and we don’t like failure, so we put our hearts and souls into trying to make things work.”

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Julian H Cope at The Firestation – reviewed

At last, the waiting is over, he steps on stage, ACID DRENCHED AND SILVER SKINNED, a comic book hero, biker king, a self-styled messiah, stretching, preacher thin, hidden eyes surveying the “mosh pit” below with a threatening stare, a wolf amongst the sheep….

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