Well, I like essays — essays written in the classic, personal mode from Montaigne to Pauline Kael to David Foster Wallace; essays which make a fairly elaborate analysis with plenty of room for details and side-issues and tangents. I don't mean that essays should merely conform to the Academic model of clearly defined terms and balanced arguments leading to a logical conclusion with predictable dryness. One the contrary, I'm looking for essays that take their time making a point, that measure the local fauna and customs and shades of grey and thereby cover much pleasant journey-time, that gain in persuasion that way.

Reading is after all a leisurely pursuit — a writer should flatter the reader with generous padding and aim for a style as comfortable as a favourite couch. Rich on details and leisurely precise observations, an easy-going chatty mode of address like a truly dialogic conversation held (without hurry) over cognac and cigars. The important thing is that a meaning/interpretation/point is being worked towards, but in no hurry to arrive. Slow is more.

Imagine Lawrence Sterne (of Tristram Shandy fame) writing for Vanity Fair or Colors or The Idler. Imagine Jean-Luc Godard's guerrilla-essay-poetics in limitless documentary. Imagine a group of jazz musos having a late-night session just for the love of playing. You tend to write better or more generously about a subject you know or respect when limits on time and space are absent or irrelevant. So give it the red-carpet prose treatment it deserves; write from what you know and love. 

What can be reviewed? Books, films, music, tv series and episodes, actors, painters, politicians (especially has-been politicians), fine vintages, magazine articles or old reviews (even a single, cloying paragraph, as in: It took us a while, but we're on to you, oh yes!), scenes in life and representation, old slippers, photographs, technologies or styles, arguments, appliances, streets, shirts, buildings, a very particular gin or horn section, the expressive ballet of Joan Fontaine's eyebrows, any footage in black & white, dated slang/jargon/usage� anything worthy of slow and patient deliberation. For instance, I'm gonna write a piece about my 1940s typewriter. It's high time the machine got a free plug.

Generally speaking, it's about a tendency to rescue/revive/reveal stuff that can't, won't or wasn't promoted first time round or which simply disappeared — with of course plenty of comic leeway. It's whatever corresponds with the Slow Lifestyle; to develop a kudos aesthetic through items only the Slow Review would claim and celebrate with due consideration.

Anything from four hundred to four thousand words (although a thousand is where justice begins). On anything at least six months (or ideally, at least a year) old.

Email your suggestions here .