This is one of two books I read in preparation for this Dracula Society trip to Bath in mid-May, the relevance being that the author lived there in later life and there is a museum about him there in a tower which he commissioned. Though the trip hasn't been officially cancelled yet, it's pretty obvious that it will be, which is a pity. Nonetheless ( Read more... )

What a pity Doctor Who wasn't broadcast in the autumn this year, as this episode would really have suited a slot around Halloween. Still, the evenings are dark and the weather dismal all the same, and it delivered an excellent dose of Gothic horror, as well as one of the more historically accurate portrayals of the Diodati weekend I have come ( Read more... )

The General Election put a stop to my book and film review posts (and indeed to the watching of films in particular), so here's a stab at catching up.

This book is a sequel to The Vampyre: the secret history of Lord Byron, which I read a couple of years ago ( LJ / DW) and really liked, despite not otherwise having much respect for the author. Where ( Read more... )

Oops, I've let a bit of a film review back-log accrue again... Let's see what I can do about that this afternoon.

I saw this one with
( Read more... )

I haven't caught up on unwritten film reviews yet, but this evening I feel like taking on a book. I read this particular book while on holiday in Cyprus last April with the lovely
( Read more... )

Tom Holland is best known to me for writing utterly conventional popular history books away from which I periodically have to steer my students, and nowadays also for behaving as though this somehow makes him a uniquely insightful commentator on world affairs on Twitter. (It doesn't.) But it turns out that in the mid-'90s he wrote a really rather ( Read more... )

3. Mary Shelley (1818), Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

I read this in preparation for a trip to Geneva with the Dracula Society, organised to mark the bicentenary of the famous wet weekend in the Villa Diodati which gave rise to it (and to Polidori's 'The Vampyre'). I never wrote about the trip here in any detail, because it came half way ( Read more... )

...keeping me up all night!

Actually, they aren't really owls, but apparently some openings in the roofing of the flats where I live, which make hooting sounds exactly like owls when the wind blows through them. Which was most of last night. Still, it gives me a great opportunity to introduce my latest icon (man, I just love the way us permies get ( Read more... )