Böcker av Tom Cullen

'What's My Problem?' is Tom's second poetry collection, preceded by 2022's 'Us', available via Amazon or BookLeaf Publishing Store. In this follow up, Tom continues oscillating between a confessional, emotive style and social critique by positing profound questions. What's his problem? Where do environmental factors start and personal responsibility end in shaping human actions? What is the role of radical kindness in a world that has been structured to denigrate it? And perhaps the most significant question of all: why are dating apps so darn depressing?

'Us' is a collection inspired by the power of love, kindness and compassion, in particular how these feelings can help us to overcome pain, trauma, loneliness and loss. These works serve as testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit, including how connecting with others and putting others before yourself is both an act of emancipation and healing. The author hopes that, if you take nothing else from 'Us', that you realise you are not alone and that you are deserving of love.

Immortalised in Christopher Isherwood's classic novel Mr Norris Changes Trains, Gerald Hamilton was the real-life model for the seedy but beguiling Mr Norris. Isherwood put him on the literary map but he was on other maps already, including those of police forces across Europe, and he was interned in Brixton prison during both world wars as a threat to national security. A Communist agent in the Thirties, Hamilton later drifted to the right and put his faith in the "sacred cause" of absolute monarchy. Despite his somewhat grotesque appearance he had a fruity charm, and he knew everyone from the last Tsar and Guy Burgess to Sir Oswald Mosley and Aleister Crowley, who kept tabs on him for the Special Branch when they shared a flat in Weimar Berlin. Hamilton never lost his impeccable Edwardian manners or his love of wine and food, whatever life threw at him in the way of personal and global crises. "We live in stirring times," he liked to say, "tea-stirring times." Written in the 1970s, the late Tom Cullen's biography of this louche and dubious character was long thought lost, but the manuscript has been traced by Phil Baker, biographer of Dennis Wheatley and Austin Osman Spare, who contributes an introduction, 'The Importance of Being Gerald'.