John Baker’s Blog

In this 1936 essay, the novelist recollects working in a second-hand bookshop “on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town” and tells how the experience caused him to lose his love of books:
Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors [...]

 
Terror of Flight 101: An echo of Orwell.
The flight leaves Heathrow airport’s Terminal Four, every Wednesday bearing the number KQ101. The echo of George Orwell’s Room 101 is unhappily appropriate. On this Kenya Airways jet, many asylum-seekers’ worst nightmares do come true. KQ101 is the deportation flight chartered by the British Government to return refugees [...]

In the mid 1980s Captain Gert Wiesler (Ulrich Muehe), a surveillance specialist and interrogation expert who works for the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), takes on the job of watching poet and playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck).
The surveillance is undertaken at the behest of Minister of [...]

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use [...]