Straight talking on business, brands, technology and employee engagement.

It’s the weekend and I’ve just done a long flight from Heathrow to Singapore so I’m forgiving myself for an indulgent non-business post. 

I spent much of the 13 hours to Singapore reading the latest issue of my favourite magazine, Fantastic Man. Out four times per year, the current issue being number 15 for Spring/Summer 2012 it has a wonderfully playful writing style that just makes life a little bit happier. 

This issue is full, as always, of interesting, proper-length articles. It’s not constrained by soundbites or rubbish, and is able to given a good length to some great stories. Amongst many interesting things you can read about Ian Thorp, the Australian swimmer and his faltering love affair with competition swimming (appropriate as I am en route to his home country), and there is a great article on Perry Chen, founder of crowd-funding website Kickstarter which I’m a huge fan of and was planning to talk about at some time on this blog.

In a world of 160 character tweets and rolling news that repeats every 11 minutes, Fantastic Man is a magazine with that has both substance and irreverence, in equal measure.

For women, I understand the publishers of Fantastic Man have recently embarked on a sister project called The Gentlewoman. I have no idea what its like, but given it’s excellent parentage you should check it out.

You can get Fantastic Man by subscription, by ordering from your local newsagent or in the magazine department of Selfridges or larger branches of WH Smith.

Honesty Policy : I’ve got no connection with Fantastic Man at all but my partner does sublet office space from a production company associated with them. This is entirely co-incidental and I’ve loved the magazine for a lot longer than he has rented the office space. It’s just Shoreditch - everyone’s on top of each other there.