When I started researching my recent BBC essay , one question in the back of my mind was, how am I going to draw a black hole? There aren't exactly a wealth of images of the real thing - just a handful of blurry telescope images to go by: orange doughnuts floating in darkness . But once I got onto the drawing phase of the project I realised this situation actually gave me a great deal of artistic freedom not available in my last illustrated essay (in which I felt a significa

During the 1980s, when I was something less than ten years old, my brother and I auditioned for roles in a stage adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Junglebook. Despite the fact that, as far as I could tell, I was the better actor, my brother was cast in the lead role of Mowgli while I was given a non-speaking role as one of a chorus of monkeys. I understood that my brother seemed more wild. He had a restless energy that he found hard to disguise, he was more energetic, less self

This year is the 30th anniversary of Madonna's photo-book Sex . I was an adolescent when it was published but I clearly remember a conversation between some critics on the radio at the time. One of them said Madonna's boobs were 'lower' than they'd expected: the intimation being that her body was somehow not as 'good' as they had anticipated. Another said "It's like she can't get naked enough," suggesting, as I understood it, that the images came across as effortful in a way