Over the years, and particularly since I left advertising, I’ve written on a variety of subjects for various publications. Here is a short selection of some of my pieces, with connections (maybe tenuous in some cases) to But Now You’re Here and The Real Mad Men.
Nightwatchman #50 / Summer 2025
HOLDING TO AMY
Written for Wisden’s cricket quarterly, this is a curious piece where I wanted to connect two monumental emotions experienced within hours of each other. One is literally of life and death, the other a moment in sport that should, comparatively, be utterly trivial. But the two, totally unrelated in nature, have stuck in my mind for nearly 50 years.
Campaign / MARCH 2015
Advertising in fiction
Plenty of great novelists have passed through the doors of advertising agencies. Some of them have written about advertising itself – Dorothy L Sayers being a notable. And it’s fascinating just how many of these books are shot through with self-loathing.
FINANCIAL TIMES / JULY 2006
How the 1950s made the 1960s
Written in some irritation on the death of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, which had prompted a smart-arsed thirtysomething music journalist to pontificate that 1960s music was overrated, the Floyd included. My contention was that you could not possibly pass judgement on what we did in the 1960s unless you’d lived through the 1950s.