Great Expectorations
I have just finished watching the BBC series impertinently entitled Great Expectations. I watched all six episodes because the visuals are superb. The realisation of the period is…
A running buffet of the thoughts and ideas that crowd into a writer’s life.
I have just finished watching the BBC series impertinently entitled Great Expectations. I watched all six episodes because the visuals are superb. The realisation of the period is…
Circle of Vanity by Michael Reidy If you enjoyed Michael Reidy’s On the Edge of Dreams and Nightmares, as I did, you will be delighted to find that…
What I have been watching La Strada (Fellini) ***** [Heart-rending] Matador (Almodóvar) *** Viridiana (Buñuel) **** The Impossible (Byona) **** [Surprisingly good] Bad Education (Almodóvar) **** Bonjour Tristesse…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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’…
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…