Tag Archives: Mick Herron

2025 End of year list 5: Blog traffic

Posted on 4 Jan 2026 | 2 comments

This is the last end of 2025 list, and I don’t expect you to read it – it’s mainly so I’ll have a record.

Here are the posts that attracted most clicks on my blog in 2025:

  1. Niall Williams’s Time of the Child (February 2025, 861 hits)
  2. Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (July 2020, 847 hits)
  3. There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak and the Book Club (October 2024, 734 hits))
  4. Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother (March 2023, 591 hits)
  5. Yael van der Wouden’s Safekeep at the Book Club (January 2025, 576 hits)
  6. Andrew O’Hagan on Caledonian Road with the book club (July 2024, 525 hits)
  7. Robert Alter’s Psalms (September 2020, 491 clicks)
  8. Mick Herron’s Standing by the Wall (October 2023, 489 hits)
  9. The Book Group & Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, page 77 (May 2024, 422 hits)
  10. The Book Club and Paul Murray’s Bee Sting (April 2024, 400 hits)

I don’t know what these figures mean. The Mick Herron book is almost not a book.

Here’s WordPress’s list of my all-time top ten posts. This list stays pretty stable. The long-time place-holders don’t need to get many views to stay, and only one of them was in this year’s top ten:

  1. Travelling with the Art Student (November 2014, 3567 hits)
  2. The Book Group and Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus (June 2018, 3010 hits)
  3. (Re-)reading Kevin Gilbert’s poetry (April 2012, 2499 hits)
  4. Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (April 2020, 2193 hits)
  5. Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (July 2020, 2074 hits)
  6. Mary Oliver’s House of Light (April 2020, 1909 hits)
  7. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (October 2023, 1880 hits)
  8. Bran Nue Dae (January 2010, 1856 hits)
  9. Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother (March 2023, 1672 hits)
  10. The book group’s Harp in the South (February 2011, 1447 hits)

The post at the top of the list is there because someone lifted an image from it and put it up on Pinterest.

That’s it. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to those statistics. Some of you I know IRL, some I’ve met through email etc, some in the comments section, some I know only as anonymous clickers. I’m happy that you’ve visited the blog. Come again.

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2025 End of Year List 3: TV series

Posted on 4 Jan 2026 | 8 comments

The Emerging Artist and I watch far too much television. A lot of it is very good. To make a list of ‘best’ we had to struggle to extract specific shows from the blur. I’m not sure we agreed completely so here is my list compiled in consultation though not always complete agreement with the Emerging Artist. There are 23 titles in fairly shaky categories.

Reminiscence

Judge John Deed (G F Newman 2002–2007) was a new discovery for us which we loved mainly for Martin Shaw’s wonderful screen presence as a nonconformist judge. We binged on Northern Exposure (Joshua Brand and John Falsey 1990–1995), which held up surprisingly well. And our comfort binge was Rake, Season 1–5 (Peter Duncan, Richard Roxburgh and Charles Waterstreet 2010–2018), which probably couldn’t be made now but is fabulous.

Police

Soooo much crime. So many crime series are really about watching the face of the main detective as she (these days it’s very often a woman) does her detecting. From a huge field, we’ve selected these:

  • Blue Lights, season 3 (Declan Lawn & Adam Patterson) continues to follow the lives of a group of recruits to the Belfast Gardaí. Among other faces there’s that of Katherine Devlin
  • Dept. Q (from novels of Jusii Adler-Olsen 2025) transposes a Nordic crime series to Scotland. The face belongs to a bearded Matthew Goode.
  • Get Millie Black (Marlon James 2024), created by Jamaican novelist Marlon James, writes back to shows like Death in Paradise . The face is Tamara Lawrance’s.
  • Karen Pirie, series 1 & 2 (Emer Kenny 2022, 2025) is another Scottish procedural. The face is Lauren Lyle’s.
  • Trigger Point, Series 3 (Daniel Brierly 2025) is a bomb disposal unit in London, with Vicky McClure as the main face

Comedy

  • Nobody Wants This, season 2 (Erin Foster 2025), a romcom in which a Christian heritage woman and a rabbi negotiate their relationship.
  • The Studio (Seth Rogan 2025): inside Hollywood
  • Iris (Doria Tillier 2024): a comedy of manners featuring socially awkward truth-teller
  • The Rehearsal, season 1 & 2 (Nathan Fielder 2025): sometimes unsettling show about a man who helps people rehearse for stressful events in their lives
  • Étoile (Daniel Palladino & Amy Sherman-Palladino 2025): French and a New York ballet companies swap key talents
  • The Change, season 2 (Bridget Christie 2025): A post-menopausal woman sets out on a journey of self discovery in the English woods where she gets entangled with a deeply weird community

Drama

  • The Diplomat, season 3 (Debora Cahn 2025): what looks increasingly like fantasy in the age of Trump, a woman with bad hair (Keri Russell) is a brilliant diplomat
  • The Shift / Dag & Nat, Season 2 (Lone Scherfig 2024): a Danish obstetrics unit under pressure day and night
  • Sherwood, season 2 (James Graham 2024): a community where the wounds from the miners’ strike under Thatcher still sting
  • The Hack (Jack Thorne 2025): David Tennant with bad hair as an investigative journalist versus the Murdoch empire
  • Paradise (Dan Fogelman 2025): this starts out as a murder mystery and develops into a dystopian fantasy
  • Down Cemetery Road (Morwenna Banks 2025): Emma Thompson, also with bad hair!

Documentary series

We didn’t watch many documentary series this year, but the five-episode Mr. Scorsese, directed by Rebecca Miller was excellent. Lots of clips and wonderful interviews with family, friends, actors and other directors.

My nominations for Year’s Best

  • Adolescence (Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham 2025). Brilliant brilliant brilliant!
  • Slow Horses Season 5 (Will Smith and others, from books by Mick Herron 2025): Five seasons in, this is still funny and gripping and leaves me wanting more. You come away thinking you could smell Gary Oldman.

Thank you for reading this far. Please add your own favourites in the comments.

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End of Year List 2: TV series

Posted on 30 Dec 2023 | 5 comments

I watch too much television, but at least in 2023 an awful lot of it has been very good.

Last year we allowed ourselves to name just three shows. This year we decided to have two or three in each of five categories, and then in one of the categories we had to break that rule. It’s probably true that in every category we would have chosen different titles on another day. Three of the ones we chose were the final seasons of longer-running shows, all of them most satisfactory conclusions.

Cop shows

Sherwoood (2022, writer James Graham)
Dark Winds seasons 1 and 2 (2022–2023), adapted from Tony Hillerman novels
Happy Valley season 3 (2023), creator Sally Wainwright)

Documentaries / reality TV

War on Waste series 3 (2023), star Craig Reucassel
Alone Australia (2023), series producer Holly Pickering

Historical fiction

Carmen Curlers seasons 1 & 2 (2022-2023), creator Mette Heeno
Bonn: Old Friends, New Enemies (2022), series directed by Claudia Garde
Painkiller (2023), creators Micah Fitzerman-Blue &
Noah Harpster

Comedy

Only Murdewrs in the Building series 3 (2023), creators John Hoffman & Steve Martin
Ted Lasso series 3 (2023), created by
Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly & Bill Lawrence
The Change (2023), creator and star Bridget Christie
Deadloch, season 1 (2023), creators Kate McCartney & Kate McLennan
Killing It seasons 1 and 2 (2022-2023), creators Luke Del Tredici & Dan Goor

Drama

The Marvelous Mrs Maisel season 5 (2023), creator Amy Sherman-Palladino
Succession season 4 (2023), creator Jesse Armstrong
Quartet (2017), writer Yûji Sakamoto
Slow Horses season 3 (2023), adapted from Mick Herron novels

Next, a much shorter list: Theatre

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Mick Herron’s Standing by the Wall

Posted on 10 Oct 2023 | 4 comments

Mick Herron, Standing by the Wall: A Slough House Interlude (Baskerville 2022)

This is one of those tiny books designed for display at the check-out of a books-and-mortar bookshop, to be bought on impulse as a small gift for, say, Mother’s Day, or for someone you know to be a fan of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels.

It probably found its way into our house as such a gift. I haven’t read any of the novels, but I love the TV series based on them (and I’m glad to learn that a third season is due to drop in December). For me, this book was a chance to get a taste of how it all works on the page. All the main characters are there: irascible and malodorous Lamb, obnoxious IT wiz Roddy, our hero River, salt-of-the-earth dry drunk Catherine and mistress of the archives Molly. Not much happens: River drops in on the station after extended leave to recover from being poisoned; Lamb has Roddy alter a photograph from the archives; Catherine has a moment of almost human conversation with Lamb, in which he says ‘I don’t do memories’; and most of the reject spies who work at Slough House go out for Christmas drinks. That’s it.

‘Ho!’

The name wasn’t so much dropped as thrown from the top of Slough House, and like a snowball finding its target struck Roddy Ho, two floors down, on the back of his neck. He looked up from his screen, senses quivering. He was needed.

The opening is horrendously over-written, and it goes on in that vein for a couple of pages. I was about to lay the book aside, giving quiet thanks for the wit and nuance of the TV series, when I realised that the over-writing was deliberate, allowing us a taste of Roddy Ho’s self-heroising perception of the world. The irony became clear, the prose settled down, and I was amused and gripped.

Page 47 (I can’t talk about page 76 because this is a very small book) features another piece of mock-heroics:

There was no one to flinch when, with surprising suddenness, Lamb swung his shoeless feet to the floor and went barrelling out of the room, entering Catherine’s office like a Viking on manoeuvres. Flakes of plaster fell from the ceiling when the door slammed against the wall; more drifted free as he pillaged desk drawers with the kind of controlled fury that this room alone, of all Slough House, generally provided sanctuary from. Most of what he found he dropped to the floor – reels of sticky labels, cellophane folders, account books, boxes of Biros, treasury tags; all this junk from another era, as if he were trashing a museum installation – littering the carpet with a mess of ancient stationery.

It comes as no surprise that all this furious pillaging turns out to be just Lamb looking for an envelope. Mick Herron is having a good time, and so is the reader.

The book is a fun chance to see the characters in action on the page. It may be laying the grounds for big events later in the series, or harking back in a way that will delight long-term readers, but whether or not it’s either of those things, it’s an enjoyable confection that entertained me on a train trip from Central to Parramatta and back.

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