James Davidson: Atlantis at Last!

“Of all the many disappointments of 1977, the ITV series Man from Atlantis has to be one of the greatest. The title suggested a programme that would have something to do with the lost underwater kingdom described in great detail by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias. But the reality was Patrick Duffy with webbed hands and fluorescent green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil the evil plans of an evil-looking villain with an evil-looking beard and an evil-sounding German name: Schubert.”

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London

“In the mornings, there is a clinging, overripe smell that some people say drifts in from the countryside, a folk memory of what these clipped green acres used, so recently, to be. Mulch of market gardens. Animal droppings in hot mounds. The distant rumble of construction convoys. The heron dance of elegant cloud-scraping cranes. Flocks of cyclists clustering together for safety, dipping and swerving like swallows. Hard hats and yellow tabards monkeying over the scaffolding of shrouded towers, the steel ribs of emerging stadia. Early risers, in the privilege of first-use recreation, a smudge of sun burning off the fug of pollution that hangs over a pre-Olympic city, fall into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ballets.”

Diary

Thomas Jones: The Last Days of eBay

“Around the turn of the millennium, one of the friends of friends’ bands whose gigs I used occasionally to go to in the basements and back rooms of North London pubs was an indie guitar group called Keane. One Friday night in the early summer of 2001 at the Monarch on Chalk Farm Road, my girlfriend gave their manager (an ex-boyfriend of hers) a couple of quid for a homemade CD. ‘That’ll be worth a lot of money one day,’ he said. I assumed he was joking; I privately thought it was slightly affected of the band even to have a manager – couldn’t they book their own gigs at the Bull and Gate? Shows how much I know. Three years later, having traded in their guitarist for an electric piano, they released their first album. It went on to be the UK’s second biggest-selling record of 2004.”

At the Door

Peter Campbell: Open Sesame!

Short Cuts

John Lanchester: Who’s Afraid of the Library of America?

Letters from Verena Mayer and Roland Koberg, Pete Ayrton, Sven Anderson, Richard Davenport-Hines, Slavoj ˇi˛ek, Inigo Thomas, Laura Mansnerus, Richard Pevear, Garth Clarke, W.S. Milne, DeAnn DeLuna