Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

The Guardian has a good interview/feature on Nick Hornby since Hornby's about to release A Long Way Down, his new book. The article uses Hornby's dual life as a theme - the duality of being a Cambridge-educated football supporter at a time when football was equated with yobbery, and this bit:
Hornby's history is rather complicated. One potted biography could read: age 48, son of successful businessman Sir Derek Hornby, graduated from Cambridge University, became a literary critic, then bestselling author and friend to the great and good. Another potted biography could read: lower-middle-class son of secretary mother Margaret, drifter, failed teacher, failed journalist, failed screenwriter, achieved surprising success with memoir of a football fanatic and loser. Both biographies would be equally true.
I'm excited about the new Hornby novel, even if it sounds closer to How to be Good than High Fidelity...

Hornby's column in the Believer.
Further discussion of Hornby novels at Delta Sierra Arts.

Comments

Anonymous said…
hello, where did you get the simpsons' dvd? in singapore? i can't seem to find it anywhere.
-mutton
23 April 2005 at 21:02
Daryl said…
I bought mine from the US, but last I checked Gramophone sold them all.
24 April 2005 at 00:54
Mal Smith said…
I prefer "How to be Good" to "High Fidelity". Just as much humour, but deeper. maybe you do get wiser when you get older? I'll just have to wait and see.
16 May 2005 at 11:01
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Verbal agreement

From a Grauniad Guardian article on James Dyson , inventor of the dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner: He still has one major ambition. To become a verb, in the same way that Hoover - or, as he puts it, "the alternative" - has done. I suggest to him that people are already using his product but still saying they are "hoovering". He smiles. "I don't think they'll be doing that for long," he says. That struck me as unusual - it's very rare for a firm's leader to say that he wants his product to become a verb. Lots of other companies like TiVo and Google have tried desperately to avoid their name becoming a verb, for fear of the name becoming so generic that the trademark gets diluted. But then, the Languagehat archives seem to show (see comment near the bottom) that Dyson's big on turning his name into a verb. *** Sadly, due to its distinct lack of vowels, the chances of "sng" becoming a verb seem close to zero, regardless of whate
Read more

Dog blogs, plus the I look like my dog "contest"

Image
I've just discovered Puptastic , another dog blog, and learnt the following disturbing facts: 1. The dog most likely to eat you when you're dead is the Dachshund. Beware the hot dog! 2. Some people look a lot like their dogs . A lot. But only if they own pedigrees . Actually, I've heard about this study for a long time - it made its rounds on the Net a while back. It's a selection thing. Anyway, the post had a link to pictures of what they claimed was a "I Look Like My Dog" contest (urban legend alert - I think it's more likely to be just a series of regular Cesar ads), including this one: Update: some quick Googling shows that the idea that this is a dog-resemblance contest is almost certainly not true. Presumably the "winners of the 'I Look Like My Dog' contest line was meant to be facetious, but people have taken it seriously. In reality, these were ads done by ALMAP/BBDO Sao Paulo that won some Gold awards at the 2000 Cannes Lions ( thi
Read more