While most newspapers have become more compact in recent years, The Drawbridge bucks the trend. A quarterly printed on a parchment whose girth commuters haven't encountered since Pooter was sauntering down the Holloway Road, it's a journal that thinks bigger than most, and in more ways than one. Boasting a ready-scribbled-on Sudoku grid, artwork by Joel Sternfield and David Shrigley and writing from Gerry Adams, Noam Chomsky and John Berger, there's intellectual meat here but no paucity of visual and verbal wit either. Failure is this number's theme, and DBC Pierre (who, let's face it, has crested some lows) gives advice on defeating its life-sapping effects. "Play backgammon," the reformed fraudster and Booker prize-winner counsels; "play it drunk, play it high, play it sober, deploy the dice in every mood and before and after good, bad and bent sex." (How this might assist anyone failing to get any sex is never quite explained, but it certainly sounds the way to go around exam time.) For letterology life coach L. Vaughan Spencer, however, it's simply a matter of spelling. "Change a letter," he writes, and "fail becomes sail". (By the same token, "sail" could just as easily then turn into "soil", which doesn't sound nearly so impressive.) But as Massimo Genghini notes, we always do well to remember that it's a relative term – Hitler's failure was, after all, democracy's gain.
Travis Elborough
