Authors Electric

Macbeth: unlikely to turn readers into mass murderers Today’s post may well raise a few eyebrows, coming as it does from a keen fiction writer and reader. Because I want to talk about something that’s increasingly been bothering me: the power of fiction to corrupt.  I don’t mean that reading Macbeth might turn you into a mass murderer; nor am I talking about mingling fiction with history to make a better story (eg Netflix’s The Crown )  –  though that habit is problematic in the way it plants events in the public’s unconscious that never took place.  What’s got me going is a superb series on BBC 4 called Wild Brazil . The programmes are beautifully made, with extraordinary photography, closely following animal activity in the stunning Pantanal and wild mountain regions of Brazil, focussing on three species in particular: giant otters, coatis and capuchin monkeys. Giant otters  So what’s my problem?  Here’s a clue: the BBC website describes the series as ‘an...

Five years ago, I wrote a blog entitled Vitamin pills, toilet rolls and philosophy . It was simply to offer light relief amongst the specific miseries of that period and give a loose idea of the strangeness of the world I inhabit. I’m repeating it here because of two recent events. First, there was a fascinating, informative (and very long) article in The Guardian . Then came the opening of Tom Stoppard's latest play, The Hard Problem , which examines the issue of  the coexistence of 'brain' and 'mind'. Thanks to those events,  I now see that, far from being the ravings of a disturbed psyche, my absurd confessions were part of an ongoing philosophical argument about consciousness  and may qualify me for the role of a modern Brahan Seer . The Guardian article examined the mystery of awareness. Its arguments were too complex for my tiny brain to summarise here but it seems that philosophers, neuroscientists, poets, religious people and all sorts of others have...