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.
Campaign / JULY 2011
What do the real mad men
think of mad men ?
Campaign magazine asked me a perceptive question; given that when fiction draws heavily on our own known experiences we tend to be dismissive, how did the people who were actually in advertising on Madison Avenue in the 1960s react to the TV series? It’s more complicated than we might have thought.
FINANCIAL TIMES / NOVEMBER 2006
SWING THE CHANGES
During a walk in Hyde Park in May 1971, Jonathan Gibbs the central character in But Now You’re Here compares notes on their respective 1950s upbringing with an American woman of his age. Some of his views and experiences – which I still feel quite strongly, six decades later – were explored in this piece from the FT magazine.