Movie we watched at the weekend (one of a batch of DVDs partner recently ordered online):
The Cider House Rules (1999).
Not, I think, a movie I would have spontaneously chosen to watch of my own accord.
Have not read the novel upon which it is based, and which, from a brief visit to Goodreads, appears to be much longer and have lots of ( Read more... )

Every so often, I think it may be every few years, I come across somebody announcing that they're going to write something, and it's going to do something really radical with a woman character.
She is going to be BAD.
Because no-one has ever, ever done that before.
(I think the last iteration of this was probably Gone Girl?)
Anyway, this is the ( Read more... )

Today I was participating in one of those 'Wednesday fortnight always comes' commitments which I did not bother disseminating information about to my dr rdrz because, well, topic I find myself being asked to talk about that I wish I wasn't, but can't ever think of anyone else to name.
Anyway, involved being part of a rather mixed panel scheduled in ( Read more... )

Peter O'Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise, has just died aged 90.

And thinking about Modesty B in my current context of having very preliminary thinky thoughts about a rather meta sort of paper I have committed myself to doing for a conference in the autumn (I am such a pushover when someone asks me to participate in something at a conference ( Read more... )

Okay, I really love Slightly Foxed and it is so my sort of thing, but every so often they publish a piece that gets right up my nose.

I may be making immense presumptions here, but it always seems to be a young man of a generation somewhat junior to my own claiming that some author or work is sadly neglected or unknown (like the one who claimed ( Read more... )

Further to yesterday's post on the subject, a depressing, if not entirely surprising, quote of relevance from today's Guardian Review Critical Eye column:
"I recently came across a sinister definition of a successful book club choice," confided Claudia FitzHerbert in the Daily Telegraph. "What didn't work, explained my informant, was ambiguity."

On NYE, watched the Powell/Pressburger film (as I gave partner the box set for Christmas I anticipate watching a lot of these in the near future), The Tales of Hoffmann, rather loosely based on the Offenbach opera.

It struck me that there was a certain slashiness about it: not only is Hoffmann constantly accompanied by his sidekick Nicklaus (a ( Read more... )