Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "england"

I was at Oxford University at the same time as Britain's new prime minister. But while I spent all my free time at a famous old pub opposite the historic Bodleian Library with a pint of Guinness in the company of some old Irish porters, I never saw David Cameron there. Which makes me doubt his suitability for office.

That's not because I think the prime minister should be overfond of alcohol (at Oxford, Cameron was a member of a very upper-crust private drinking club famed for smashing places up). Rather, it's because Cameron is the wrong man to unite the pub-drinkers and the rowdy aristocrats -- and all the other splinters of a society still shattered by Margaret Thatcher's destruction of the old identity of Empire.

The coalition Cameron will lead reflects an identity crisis among the English that has developed in the two decades since Thatcher's reign. It's much deeper than mere political divisions, and I don't think he's equipped to resolve it.

Read the rest of my article on AOL News.

I was under the impression that the English weren’t allowed into Wales any more, now that Tony Blair persuaded us we ought to have at least half a government of our own and let Westminster pay for it. I assume Colin Cotterill managed to make it through the border undercover on his Australian passport. Which is a good thing, because his blog post of this week was a lovely appreciations of my homeland, even down to the 28 yards of daily rainfall for which I yearn as I swelter through 40-degree desert heat here in Jerusalem.

During his stay at the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival, Colin muses that a soggy sheep would be less attractive than a dry one. A dry sheep may conjure up pleasanter images of romantic moments in the haybarn (in a land where there are more sheep than humans, romance might occasionally include a sheep.) There is, however, considerable lanolin in the sheep’s wool, so the rainfall doesn’t penetrate to the sheep’s body and therefore a good shake would be all that’s needed to dry him or her out – for further investigation, as it were.

I hope that clears things up for you, Colin. Next time you’re at the Hay festival, even if it’s raining, sheep are the perfect antidote. (Why do you think all those fat, boozed up London publishing types come all the way to the countryside?) Take this old Welsh joke as your cue:

A man walks into a pub. “Jones has been found having sex with a sheep,” he says. The barman looks up and asks, “Was it a male sheep or a female sheep?” “A female sheep, of course,” says the man. “There’s nothing wrong with Jones.”

Read the rest of this post at my blog

World Cup fans, don’t fear hours of emptiness. Take up a work by an international crime fiction author. It’s the perfect replacement for your lost fix – and it’s a lot better for your soul, too.

Here’s why. As the World Cup unfolded over the last month, newspapers all over the globe were filled with articles in which journalists extrapolated from aspects of the play and team-make up of various countries to draw lessons about the politics and sociology of those same nations.

Thus we learned that the Germans were successful not because their coach is a very smart tactician, but because they were multiethnic. We found that England’s loss was rooted in the shameless cash-fest of their football league, rather than the coach’s inability to counter German tactics and the evidence that the team’s players (who’re also pretty multiethnic) are simply a notch dumber than those of many other countries. Finally we thrilled to discover that there’s hope for the future of Spain, even if the country’s high court ruled this week that Catalans can’t refer to themselves as a “nation.” There were Catalans on the team that won in the final, the newspaper wrote, and so everything in Espana is /chévere/ (as the Spanish say when they’re feeling good) after all.

Naturally all this is the result of the feeble maneuvers of journalists and their need to come up with enough “theme” stories to keep editors from questioning the expense of sending a reporter to South Africa to write about things which are free on everybody’s television set.

The popularity of international crime fiction, however, has been in its ability to provide a window into a society in an entertaining format. Like football. Only real (even if it is fiction.)

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

One of the great pleasures of novel-writing is the research which, for almost every book, ought to bring the writer to investigate different areas of inquiry. To become a swift expert in something others might spend all their lives studying.

That’s why I’ve taken up my sword.

I’m working on a historical novel about the great Italian artist Caravaggio. That has meant learning to paint with oils, which has been even more enjoyable than learning piano while writing MOZART’S LAST ARIA, the novel I have coming out in 2011. But Caravaggio wasn’t only a painter. He was also infamous for killing a man in a rapier duel.

Hence my visit to the Academy of Historical Fencing on my recent trip to the UK, where I learned that the rather dandified image of dueling is somewhat over-romanticized. “You could fight like a gentleman or like a thug,” says Nick Thomas, one of the brothers who founded the Academy. “But it was all about killing, in the end. So it could be said that the thug predominates.”

Nick is a delightfully obsessed martial arts fan who learned Renaissance Italian so he could translate his favorite fencing manual (Ridolfo Capo Ferro’s 1610 masterpiece the “Gran Simulacro”) and has won many European rapier competitions. By day he and his brother write zombie fiction (their latest is about "Sherlock Holmes and the Zombie Problem"). With several friends, he founded the Academy in 1996. They run classes in Bristol, England, and my hometown of Newport, Wales. So after putting my son to bed, I picked up my Dad in my rental car and zipped out to Caerleon University, where Nick awaited in the gym with his swords and daggers.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.