James Butler is a writer and a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. He co-founded Novara Media in 2012, and hosted Novara FM – a radio show of in-depth political and cultural discussion, broadcast in London on Resonance FM – for a decade. He continues to love well-made radio.
On most social media sites (including Twitter and Instagram) he can be found under the name piercepenniless, this moniker being an artefact of earlier and better days of the internet, when anonymity or pseudonymity were creative possibilities rather than alibis for abuse. He maintains a commonplace book of interesting articles, snippets, obscurities, cuttings and other short-form entries. You may read the rationale for that in its first entry.
He lives on a boat in central London, with too many books.