Just in

Arts

View from the future

It’s always interesting to see a film set in the past but also produced in a different time as it tells you about both epochs. With this in mind I revisited this week Oh What a Lovely War! (1969)  and The Day of the Jackal (1973). Although no expert like Henry Elkins I am confident in [...]

January 25, 2018 // 0 Comments

The dark arts

Two aspects of art that intrigue me, and both are linked, are forgery and the contemporary art market. Recently a museum exhibition in Ghent of Russian modern art was questioned by experts for its authenticity. The Russian modern art market is notoriously prone to forgers. Another is the painter [...]

January 23, 2018 // 0 Comments

Veteran film stars

In the week I had lunch with a film buff who spoke highly of  All The Money In The World and in particular  of Christopher Plummer who, aged 88, turned out a stellar performance. The interesting thing about Christopher Plummer is that he is best known for Fritz von Trapp in The Sound of [...]

January 20, 2018 // 0 Comments

Keith Waterhouse/ Renaissance Man

I have always been a fan of Keith Waterhouse who passed away aged 81 in 2009. He was a massive talent, a polymath of all forms of writing. He made his name with Willis Hall as a scriptwriter for David Frost forming a collaboration with Ned Sherrin the first producer of  That Was the Week That [...]

January 19, 2018 // 0 Comments

Not nearly as good as the advance media verdicts would have it

Being an admirer of Winston Churchill – for all his faults, regarded by some who should know enough to judge these things as one of the all-time greatest Englishmen – and having listened to the media jungle drums over the past month or two, I had made a decision earlier this week to break the [...]

January 14, 2018 // 0 Comments

Slow Horses/Mick Herron

The espionage novel is always changing form. We have had the public school adventurer like Bulldog Drummond or Richard Hannay, the glamourous agent James Bond, the working class anti-hero Harry Palmer created by Len Deighton and then John Le Carre. Mick Herron is in the Len Deighton/John Le Carre [...]

January 13, 2018 // 0 Comments

And now for something completely different

Last night I watched a recording that I’d ‘organised’ of a BBC television documentary called A Life On Screen about Michael Palin that was first broadcast at some point last weekend. It was both fascinating and entertaining. When Monty Python’s Flying Circus first hit the television [...]

January 13, 2018 // 0 Comments

Three American film classics…and one not so

Like our Rusters journeying to and from the Antipodes I do not enjoy a long haul flight. My way of passing the time is to watch classic movies by genre. Thus on a long haul flight recently I watched 3 American classics. The first two were Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Seven Year Itch. Whilst [...]

January 12, 2018 // 0 Comments

New Years Day Concert Vienna

The ‘attend versus watch it on tv’ debate does not apply to the Vienna traditional New Years Day concert as tickets are gold dust, so I watch it every year on tv. This year they added a short film of an attractive young blonde girl on a bicycle touring the Belvedere and Leopold museums [...]

January 1, 2018 // 0 Comments

Roll on January 2nd!

There – still a few days to go before normal service is resumed but I think I’ve just about got through the festive period unscathed. There’s a point at which, when you live alone and – if you are left to your own devices – the whole of your existence becomes a matter of glorious routine [...]

December 28, 2017 // 0 Comments

1 … 115 116 117 118 119 … 184

Copyright © 2026 The National Rust | Design by Premonition