Philip Spires commonplace book

I have kept a commonplace book for many years. It's a place where scraps of impressions are filed for future reflection. It's not a diary, it's just a mental scrapbook, concentrating on book reviews, concert reviews, visual arts and some occasional pieces on travel. It is also a place where I occasionally reflect on what I write. Details of my books can be found at http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Monday, June 29, 2009

Pop culture: popular or populist? An unpopular view.

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In a recent interview Fergal Sharkey, erstwhile Northern Ireland pop singer, lamented the fact that most recording artists receive only very...

Thursday, June 25, 2009

The Master by Colm Toibin

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In The Master, Colm Toibin offers the reader a style and content quite different from his other novels. In a sense, the book is an act of ho...

Thursday, June 18, 2009

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

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In his Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga has achieved success where other illustrious writers have fallen short in ...

The Last Testament Of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd

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A journal is being written by a lonely man in a Paris hotel room. It starts, for its sins, on 9 August 1900. There was nothing auspicious ab...

Saturday, May 16, 2009

The Book Of Evidence by John Banville

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Freddie Montgomery, the central character of John Banville’s The Book Of Evidence, is an apparently complex man. The word ‘apparently’ is im...

Monday, May 4, 2009

The Line Of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

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It can be no coincidence that Nick, the Oxford graduate who comes to stay, has the surname Guest. The Feddes invite him into their London ho...

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Saturday, May 2, 2009

Love, etc by Julian Barnes

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It’s hard to imagine a more perfect marriage of form and content than Love, etc, in which Julian Barnes continues the story of characters th...

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About Me

philipspires: I was born in Wakefield and was brought up in Sharslton, a mining Village. I went to London University and then became a maths teacher, working initially as a volunteer teacher in Kenya. I spent sixteen years in London, in Balham and Islington. In 1992, I left Britain for Brunei and then Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. I currently live in La Nucia, near Benidorm in Spain. I am interested in the relationship between nature and nurture, birthright and experience. Themes of culture and identity and their relation to economic and social roles underpin my writing. What we are born into relates to what we become, but we are rarely in control. What others do, our interests and intellects and the way we choose to earn a living, all of these shape us into what we become. It may be that culture is the sum of all assumptions that others make on our behalf, whereas identity represents our reactions to them. I did a PhD on the effects of education in economic development in the Philippines. I was President of Alfas del Pi Music Society for twelve years.

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