What I have been watching La Strada (Fellini) ***** [Heart-rending] Matador (Almodóvar) *** Viridiana (Buñuel) **** The Impossible (Byona) **** [Surprisingly good] Bad Education (Almodóvar) **** Bonjour Tristesse (Preminger) ** The Illusionist (Burger) *** Possession (LaBute) ** [Overrated] Angela (Besson) *** La Cage aux Folles (Danon) *** [Funny] Shallow Grave (Boyle) *** My Own Private…

The Turning Point by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst I began reading this intriguing book last October but other business forced me to put it down. I took it up again in that strange province of suspended animation between Boxing Day and Epiphany and devoured it along with the mince pies, the stollen cake, the chocolates, the madeira…

Like everyone else, I can’t wait to get away – to Provence, Bavaria, Tuscany – wherever. Not that this green and pleasant land isn’t a chequerboard of historic cities, churches and cathedrals and beautiful rivers, woods and mountains, cliffs and beaches. But the wanderlust is strong. The philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal claimed that: ‘All…

I cannot read in my dreams. It’s nothing to do with my eyes getting tired with age. I have never been able to read in my dreams. The letters won’t keep still; they shift and blur and shrink and dance. I believe this is one of the problems with dyslexia. But I’m not dyslexic –…

Ardmore Endings struck me as a very American book. For instance, a British reader cannot fail to note the distance between places, and the characters’ nonchalant attitude to getting in the car or hopping on a train or a plane to travel to destinations which would seem remote on our crowded little island. The focus…

A good many actors refuse to read notices in the press about their performances. I suppose it’s hardly surprising that members of a profession, whose business is the expression and manipulation of emotions, are highly sensitive to criticism, whether fair or unfair. After all, they have dared to submit their inner selves to public exposure…

Coincidences  by Ian Thomson There was a boy in my form at school with the same name as me. Exactly the same name. There was no intrusive ‘p’ in Thomson. He was called ‘Ian’ like me, not ‘Iain’ or ‘Eoin’ or any other exotic variant. Neither of us had a middle name. Quite simply, we…

Michael Reidy’s The Rock Pool is suffused with nostalgia, the aching remembrance of rose-tinted, irrecoverable time, the bitter-sweet longing for a return home. ‘Home’ in the novel is not that of the narrator, Nick Lucas, but the beach house at Fulmar Point of his friend, Jack Amiche, his two sisters and their parents, where Nick…

PART ONE I enjoyed the first instalment of the 2007 version of Oliver Twist this evening. BBC Drama at its best. Sumptuous production values. A brilliant adaptation: the screenplay artfully excises padding from Dickens’ text, simplifies some of its unnecessary subplots and excursions, and even adds some clever interludes of dialogue wholly consonant with Dickens’…

en years or so ago, Fiskerton made his first appearance on Facebook. Now,it is a truth universally acknowledged that a gentleman, living alone, must be in need of a valet-cum-butler, so I invented one for myself. Fiskerton was canny, diligent and discreet and I would have him mix me a Pimm’s, lay out my dinner…