On 25 August 2026, @mymartinamis will take over Bloomsbury and Soho. Be there when it happens.

New episodes of @thelitpathpod to be announced very soon! Couldn’t be happier to have @johnyorke123 join me at the start, with a love letter to Gulliver’s Travels. Updates via the Substack thelitpath.substack.com/

For whatever reason, Aaron Pierre is not in the running to play the next Bond, but godammit he should be, and I still hope he does.

The London AI Summit was a balding, besuited republic confined entirely to an industrial-style event space near Shadwell Underground Station. There were more men than women, more over-50s than under-50s, and big money lurking in the background – the kind of money that accumulates in inverse proportion to interesting clothes; the kind that turns managerial employees into CBeebies versions of themselves. (“We both said ‘SharePoint’ at the same time!” squealed an American woman advertising an AI file-scanning company.) Everyone at the summit acted in service of this money, although they rarely mentioned whether their own companies were profitable. @elladorn_ newstatesman.com/the-weekend…

Listen to the man who masterminded some of British TV’s most iconic dramatic plot twists, @johnyorke123, explain to @jackaldane how being left on a cliffhanger as a boy sparked a new relationship to reading fiction. 🔗 to Ep#1 in replies.

My friend Jack is launching an excellent new podcast, give it a listen!

Hockney was peerless. Almost in the mold of the renaissance masters, his life and art were somehow fused into one riotous celebration of freedom. He was daring in a more conservative society, and then almost conservative in contemporary society. I will never forget the works which defined his later life, nor the title of the book “Spring Cannot Be Cancelled” which was both a middle finger to Covid lockdowns and a spiritual demonstration of the faith that life will always be reborn. It is remarkable that he is, so far as I can tell, the only person to have made a genuine and non-cynical contribution to visual art in a digital medium. Perhaps this is less a sign of his willingness to innovate than an indication that the joie de vivre which defined his art would flower in any medium. It ought to be a source of enormous shame to us that he felt forced to live abroad to find the freedom to live and create, and yet I still feel proud of being British to think that we can call such a master one of our sons.

🎧 FIRST EPISODE IS UP! @jackaldane’s first guest to set down his torch on The Lit Path is TV writer, producer and author @johnyorke123. They discuss how Gulliver’s Travels changed fiction forever in John’s mind, and why, 300 years after it was published, Swift remains humanity’s greatest heckler. 📺 🔗 in replies.

Shuggie Bain author @Doug_D_Stuart : ‘Men aren’t reading Novels. It hurts us all.’ inews.co.uk/culture/books/sh…

RT @MayorofLondon: Complaining about nightlife when you *checks notes* choose to live in Soho is like living in South Kensington and compla…

More reasons, with @Elif_Safak

“Poets are not to blame for how things are.” ―Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson

This Friday, @johnyorke123 and I begin a conversation within a conversation about why so many men overlook the power of the novel, and why Gulliver's Travels still has it in gigantic fistfuls, 300 years after it was first published. Join us then on the first episode of @thelitpathpod.

Political deepfakes (notably the one we're all seeing *every other post* of Nigel Farage terrorising Andrew Bailey in the Question Time studio) are still in their mischievous, experimental adolescence, but their creators will soon be minded to deploy them at high speed, and at sensitively plausible moments, putting those they depict at dizzying pains to deny their truth. Our reactions to these jankily-rendered fever dreams are currently based on what they show us, but deepfakes will only be fully weaponised once they're strategically released into the stream of real-time events. It won't be what we see, but when we see it, that will be the difference.