John Baker’s Blog

There’s a coffee bar next to the University library and during the summer I wander up there from time to time. They have benches and tables outside, close to the bridge and you can look over into the road and watch the students come and go. The coffee’s not the best because they use boiling [...]

In this piece from Dick Jones Patteran Pages he responds to a grim physical illness and the prospect of the debilitating effects of powerful immunosuppressants:
And yet, for all my hopes for future endurance, I need powerfully to disengage myself from both past and future as the principal determinants of present functioning. I need to locate [...]

Amazon’s reply to criticism of its recent POD announcement, insisting that POD publishers use its own BookSurge publishing service.
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Joan Didion’s memoir about trying to come to terms with her husband’s death became ‘the indispensable handbook to bereavement’. Then her 39-year-old daughter also died. As The Year of Magical Thinking arrives in London, David Hare describes [...]

A taster:
One minute before the end of the world, everyone gathers on the grounds of the Kunstmuseum. Men, women, and children for a giant circle and hold hands. No one moves. No one speaks. It is so absolutely quiet that each person can hear the heart-beat of the person to his right or his left. [...]