Thank you to those who have written to me personally to let me know your thoughts on Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros and Contemporary Tragic Drama. I am gratified that the book is getting into your hands, and gratified too that some of you have been mentioning the book to others. Most recently, theatre artist Chris Goode at the indispensible Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire wrote that Word Made Flesh is “gripping, really rather ravishing,” and it is hard for me to ask for higher praise than that. You’re welcome to find out for yourself — the book is available from a variety of different outlets in the US, the UK and Australia; you can make my publisher happy by ordering a copy today, and samples are available at the Web page and Facebook page for the book.

On the subject of books: my readers may also be interested in three new volumes sitting on my bedside table, about which I’ll be writing soon. The first is David Rudkin’s new plays Red Sun and Merlin Unchained from Intellect Books, the second Laurence Dreyfus’ Wagner and the Erotic Impulse from Harvard University Press, and the third the new translation of The World as Will and Representation: Volume 1 from Cambridge University Press. Whether these (and my book) make for good beach reading, I don’t know, but I don’t care for beaches all that much myself — as Woody Allen once said, “I don’t tan, I stroke” — so those readers with a similar disposition may want to while away a few air-conditioned hours with these.

Clearly I’ve been spending a lot of time in my study, such as it is, and not much time at the theatre. So a brief note of apology to those artists whose shows over the past year or so I’ve had great intentions of seeing but have been unable to do so. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and one of the offramps of this expressway is to the village of Regret, populated by productions I would dearly liked to have attended. But my family, the great loves of my life, must come first.