The Reader 29

Issue 29 of The Reader magazine is now available and for the first time in a while I have something in it in the shape of a short article on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. Yours truly notwithstanding this looks like a great issue, including writing by [...]

Beams Falling

I have a piece today on the Guardian Books Blog about the ‘Flitcraft parable’ in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. I’ve been puzzling over this extraordinary digression for a while now–before Christmas I wrote a longer article on the subject which will appear in The Reader later this year–but what strikes me most of all [...]

Catching Up, Moving On

Siobhan and I sent off the manuscript for Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language earlier this week after an intense month of re-reading, revision, collation and correction. We’ve done very little else since early January so there is a lot of catching up to do, but there are also exciting new projects [...]

Philosophy and Sport

As the Key Ideas book nears completion–we’re tidying up the manuscript in preparation for sending it off to the publisher–I have a piece on The Reader Online about philosophy and sport. Here’s a taster:
Philosophers do not have a strong reputation for being active types. In the popular imagination philosophers spend their time in armchairs, eschewing [...]

Peter Blake and Cain’s Finest Lager

In what must be quite a coup Cain’s have just released a special edition bottle of their Cain’s Finest Lager with a label designed by Sir Peter Blake, of Sgt Pepper album cover fame. Cain’s is official beer of Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008 and this is a fitting way to celebrate the brewery’s [...]