Essential reading.

Boards of Canada Tape 5 video still. Broken parallel lines, like static from a video recorder.

Boards Of Canada have shared a new track, ‘Tape 05’, fuelling further speculation around the duo’s first album since 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest...

buff.ly/vqXmLt5

Maybe there is….

A rainbow over Pilrig Park in Leith. Trees in foreground, tenements in the distance.

A rainbow, earlier today.

‘A Leaf’ (published by Nine Pens)

The Goldenacre | Birlinn Ltd - Independent Scottish Publisher - buy books online Winner of the Shamus Award for the Best First P.I. Novel The Goldenacre – a masterpiece by the painter and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh – has been given to the people of Scotland. The beautiful...

The Goldenacre - ‘A first class thriller’ (The Times)

Winner of the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel.

birlinn.co.uk/product/the-...

Stefan Collini · Capital Brandy: Eliot on the Run For much of the second half of his life, T.S. Eliot was a man on the run, retreating to actual or symbolic boltholes,...

TS Eliot to Virginia Woolf: ‘…. it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.’

Indeed.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Philip Miller | Nine Pens

‘Blame Yourself’, a collection of poetry, is published by Nine Pens.

ninepens.co.uk/2022-poets/p...

A beautiful day here…

A dogged reporter takes on a mysterious cabal in 'The Diary of Lies' Philip Miller's sinister thriller is set in a Great Britain that's lost its bearings. But even when she's terrified, fictional journalist Shona Sandison will always risk everything to get the story.

NPR’s ‘The Diary of Lies' review: Philip Miller's thriller about a dogged reporter

www.npr.org/2025/08/13/n...

Looking forward to talking about my books at Kirkcudbright Book Festival on Friday. Come along…

Full Programme — Kirkcudbright Book Festival Kirkcudbright Book Festival March 5-8th 2026 Programme

Kirkcudbright Book Festival 2026
5–8 March

Kirkcudbright Book Festival celebrates local & national voices, local history, Scottish culture, children’s authors, crime fiction, nature & the environment & much more – full programme online now
www.kbtbookfestival.org/full-programme

Love Song, a poem published last year.

I’m an Ambassador for this brilliant charity, Bookbanks, giving away books with food parcels at food banks. There are two part-time jobs going for Regional Leads in London and East Anglia.

Link below.

Please share far and wide :)

My second book, out of print in the UK…but takes in the afterlife, the cosmos, the rise of fascism, a boy and his dog, and the fate of newspapers….

Allan Massie, 1938-2026 Father died this afternoon.

We've lost the great Allan Massie. An absolute giant of Scottish literature and journalism, and an inspirational, kind and generous man, too. I think his son @alexmassie.bsky.social is only sporadically on Bluesky, but he has written a beautiful obituary. alexmassie.substack.com/p/allan-mass...

A dogged reporter takes on a mysterious cabal in 'The Diary of Lies' Philip Miller's sinister thriller is set in a Great Britain that's lost its bearings. But even when she's terrified, fictional journalist Shona Sandison will always risk everything to get the story.

‘When Shona finally discovers the masterplan, it's a social policy so cruel and retrograde that, 10 years ago, I would have laughed at its hyperbolic preposterousness. It says something about our historical moment that the scheme no longer seems laughable.’

www.npr.org/2025/08/13/n...

Grendel over Victoria Park.

There’s not going to be another Boards of Canada album is there.

A dogged reporter takes on a mysterious cabal in 'The Diary of Lies' Philip Miller's sinister thriller is set in a Great Britain that's lost its bearings. But even when she's terrified, fictional journalist Shona Sandison will always risk everything to get the story.

‘When Shona finally discovers the masterplan, it's a social policy so cruel and retrograde that, 10 years ago, I would have laughed at its hyperbolic preposterousness. It says something about our historical moment that the scheme no longer seems laughable.’

www.npr.org/2025/08/13/n...

Scottish Noir, THE DIARY OF LIES by Philip Miller (3rd Shona Sandison Book) Reviews of mystery books and crime fiction, classic to cutting edge, cozies to hard-boiled to espionage.

‘There's no need to read the two preceding novels, but those who have will notice right away that the sense of ancient mythos and of a universe that's not automatically friendly is still throbbing in Miller's version of Edinburgh and its surroundings.’

kingdombks.blogspot.com/2025/08/scot...

Morning in Edinburgh.

Thrillers With Twists You Won’t See Coming

The @nytimes.com on The Diary of Lies… ‘Excellent . . . Admirers of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series will appreciate the similarly jaundiced tone.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/b...

What a band, Agriculture. Second half of their latest record is particularly immense.

Well played, Transport for London

Full Programme — Kirkcudbright Book Festival Kirkcudbright Book Festival March 5-8th 2026 Programme

Looking forward to talking about my books in Kirkcudbright in March….@kbtbookfestival

kbtbookfestival.org/full-programme

Outside my friends, Mark Fisher was one of the first people to say he rated my (non-journalism) writing. I think if K-Punk often and those times. Another world.

It’s taken me this long to realise Will Stanton’s circles are not solid. How else could he put them on his belt….#thedarkisrising

Festive goodwill to most of you from here.

Not out of the woods yet. But there’s always hope.

Henri-Pierre Danloux | National Galleries of Scotland A society portrait painter in his native France, Danloux's career was interrupted by the French Revolution. He moved to London where he exhibited…

Personally, thinks it’s probably by Danloux. Especially when you look at his other work.

www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-arti...