Category: Uncategorized
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Newcastle United, hope and me
Football, said the former Italy and AC Milan manager Arrigo Sacchi, is “the most important of the unimportant things in life.” My happiness doesn’t hinge entirely on Newcastle United’s results — which is just as well I suppose. But I am a lot happier when they win. I like football, the sport, as a spectacle…
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Not Like Us, review
The following was my 2025 entry for the Anthony Burgess Prize… In Not Like Us, Kendrick Lamar delivers a devastating diss track, a club banger, a workout song and a treatise on cultural appropriation all at once. Taking aim at his long-term rival Drake, the zingy composition which uses samples from Monk Higgins’s 1968 jazz…
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What a backpack taught me about self-care
This year, during Black Friday month, which sounds more ridiculous the more you say it, I needed a new backpack. So I made use of the invasive and gimmicky discount to buy a “Transporter Deluxe” from Spiral, while resisting the urge to finally upgrade my PS4 paperweight. Instead of £50, I paid £30. After around…
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Thank you, foreign-language films
I don’t speak Japanese, French, Spanish, Korean or Hindi. But, thanks to the low-tech intervention of subtitles, I’ve been able to watch and enjoy several excellent films in these languages over the past 18 months. Godzilla Minus One, which won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, is as engaging as it is aesthetically pleasing.…
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Top Boy, review
The following was my 2024 entry for the Anthony Burgess Prize… The conclusion to Ronan Bennet’s sprawling crime drama Top Boy is abrupt, unsatisfying, and raises many more questions than it answers – which is what makes it perfect. That Netflix wanted the show to “carry on forever”, according to its lead Ashley Walters, is…
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‘Prem-flix’ is the perfect tonic for piracy
Last month, a gang of five men who illegally streamed Premier League football matches to mass audiences were jailed at Chesterfield Crown Court. The ringleader was sentenced to 11 years in prison. The operation, which supplied modified VPN-altering satellite boxes, is thought to have made more than £7 million from at least 50,000 users. Piracy…
Rohan Banerjee 