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Author Archive

The Real Concrete Island?

By Mike Bonsall • Dec 3rd, 2008 •

Category: WWII, architecture, features, psychogeography, speed & violence

Mike Bonsall sets out on a mission to find The Real Concrete Island, and is surprised by what he finds: ‘Ballard must have walked the same streets that years later I was to haunt with my own damaged crew. Living within sight of the Westway, which I felt must have helped form his motorway mythology, I was moved to do some geo-detective work…’


'Up a kind of sociological Amazon': Ballard on Miracles

By Mike Bonsall • Feb 21st, 2008 •

Category: Shanghai, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, WWII, archival, autobiography, consumerism

Here’s the last in our batch of transcripts of recent Miracles promotions: James Naughtie’s interview with JGB for BBC Radio 4.


'Obeying the surrealist formula': Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard

By Mike Bonsall • Feb 17th, 2008 •

Category: Iain Sinclair, Salvador Dali, Shanghai, Shepperton, WWII, archival, autobiography, speed & violence, surrealism, visual art

Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee.


'Genius eye for the killer detail': Parsons, Harris & Myerson on Ballard

By Mike Bonsall • Feb 14th, 2008 •

Category: Shanghai, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, WWII, archival, autobiography, celebrity culture

This one’s a transcript of BBC 2’s Newsnight Review segment on Miracles of Life. It features Tony Parsons, Julie Myerson and John Harris and is presented by Kirsty Wark.


J.G. Ballard's Experiment in Chemical Living

By Mike Bonsall • Aug 1st, 2007 •

Category: Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shepperton, William Burroughs, advertising, features, invisible literature

by Mike Bonsall

J.G. Ballard in 1960. In the background is a poster of his ‘Project for a new novel’, made two years earlier.
Chemistry & Industry … was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most of it [...]


Another Atrocity: A 'New' Work by J.G. Ballard

By Mike Bonsall • Feb 17th, 2006 •

Category: Borges, features, medical procedure, pastiche

The Atrocity Exhibition is a collection of J.G. Ballard’s most extraordinary short stories. Written in the few years following the tragic death of his wife, they are his most difficult work, representing the extremes of anguish, desire, alienation and horror. Compact and repetitive, they pick over the same questions of psychopathology, sexuality and death in [...]