Ray Robertson

Profound, perceptive, and wryly observed, Estates Large and Small is the story of one man's reckoning and an ardent defence of the shape books make in a life. What decades of rent increases and declining readership couldn't do, a pandemic finally did: Phil Cooper has reluctantly closed his secondhand bookstore and moved his business online. Smoking too much pot and...

A Grateful Dead concert, Ray Robertson argues, is life. Like life, it can be alternately compelling and lacklustre; familiar and foreign; occasionally sublime and sometimes insipid. Although the Grateful Dead stopped the day Jerry Garcia's heart did, what the band left behind is the next best thing to being there in the third row, courtesy of the group's unorthodox decision...