Author Information
Philip Spires
Member since 29th August 2007
Occupation: Writer I grew up in Sharlston, then a mining village, and later Crofton, near Wakefield, UK. I went to London University and then did two years as a VSO in Kenya. For 16 years I taught in London before moving to Brunei technical education. I worked to Zayed University in the UAE for three years and, since 2003, I have lived in Spain, completing a PhD in education’s role in Philippine development and my first published novel, Mission.
Displaying 1 to 10 (of 10 articles)
25th May 2008
Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester is a novel that is hard to praise too highly. Set in Hong Kong, it presents the stories of four main characters, each of which is an immigrant to this city. Behind them at all times is a culture that rules their lives, ...
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25th May 2008
The Door by Magda Szabo is a detailed, intimate account of a relationship between two women. Paradoxically, it was the distance between them that generated the intimacy. Presented with behaviour and attitudes she could not identify with or recognise, a yo...
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25th May 2008
My Life As A Fake by Peter Carey is a strange, multi-layered journey through a man’s past, his artistic inspiration and his products, both illusory and real. Christopher Chubb is Australian and a budding poet. He resents the privilege of a certain litte...
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15th April 2008
It may be that in musical retrospect, from a luxury of twenty-twenty critical hindsight, that Astor Piazzolla will be seen as having done in the twentieth century for the tango what Frederick Chopin did in the nineteenth for the waltz. It is perhaps alrea...
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07th November 2007
In August 1992, myself and my wife, Caroline, arranged a trip to post-Tiananmen China. It was in the days when the London China Travel office was on Cambridge Circus, opposite the Palace Theatre on Charing Cross Road. It took me at least twenty books, a...
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01st November 2007
I have wanted to visit Toledo for at least forty years and for one particular reason, being the canvases of Domenicos Theotokopoulos, or El Greco as we have learned to call him. Well, now I have been and I found what I sought, plus a truly amazing and une...
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25th September 2007
It’s often that chance encounters, the unplanned events, linger, long after the excursions and the sights of a particular trip have faded. It was in 1998 when my wife and I visited central Japan, basing ourselves in Kyoto, having availed ourselves of ch...
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07th September 2007
Festival – Nits de la Mediterrania, La NuciaTwentieth Century BalletsThe final concert of the inaugural La Nucia arts festival took place last night. Starting at 10:30pm, it was staged in the town’s recently completed open air audito...
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29th August 2007
Just occasionally – in fact pretty rarely these days – something utterly surprising emerges from an evening in a concert hall. Almost forty years into an interest in music which has focused on every style of western music from Gothic to minimalism (pe...
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29th August 2007
Mention Benidorm and with it, by implication, the concepts of package tourism, hotel buffets, British bars with one euro a pint lager, northern English Working Men’s Club turns imitating something neither themselves nor their audience have ever been, lo...
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