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Transatlantic – Colum McCann

Novels set in both Ireland and the USA like Brooklyn (now a film) are all the rage. Colm Toibin the author of Brooklyn leads the genre but Colum McCann runs him close. I very much enjoyed his Let the Great World Spin as did many as it became an international bestseller. Transatlantic had been lying [...]

May 6, 2016 // 0 Comments

Bring on Series 4 …

A word of salute to third series of BBC2’s police-procedural drama series Line Of Duty – first created and written by Jed Mercurio in 2012 – which finished on Thursday evening with an epic 90-minute episode. Having recorded the entire series, I watched said finale for the second time in [...]

May 1, 2016 // 0 Comments

Sunset Boulevard

I had an interesting conversation with Neil Rosen on what constitutes a good musical. Most people would say a complete score of fine songs like My Fair Lady or Oliver or his favorite Gigi. I tend, as a theatre man, to concentrate on performance. I esteem Ron Moody as Fagin or Julie Andrews in Sound [...]

April 28, 2016 // 0 Comments

Eye in the Sky

If Bastille Day left me without any after taste of thought, you could not say the same with Eye in the Sky a film that was troubling in the issues it raised. In brief a combined US, British and Kenyan military operation has to evaluate whether a drone missile should destroy a house inNarobi [...]

April 25, 2016 // 0 Comments

Grammar school

Two signals of the development of the human brain into something which gave Man primacy over other species, or so we may like to think, are its ability to pass on acquired knowledge via speech and then literacy. There are a number of examples of the former in animals and birds – two examples [...]

April 25, 2016 // 0 Comments

Bastille Day

If you like high octane action films where you suspend belief on the plot this is for you. Idris  Elba plays a one man army (Briar) in Paris believing a pickpocket is not a terrorist. Young French Canadian actress Charlotte le Bon will not commit the bombing of right wing political headquarters [...]

April 23, 2016 // 0 Comments

Films on the Riviera

Bob Tickler asked me to recommend films set on the Riviera to remind him of his recent successful trip there. I came up with To Catch a Thief the 1955 Alfred Hitchcock directed movie starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly and the more recent Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Michael Caine and Steve Martin. [...]

April 21, 2016 // 0 Comments

Some celebrations are always worth it

With the celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare now flowering into their full majesty, I suspect there are millions of literary and theatrical philistines around the world like me who going to enjoy and benefit enormously from the surfeit of media articles, [...]

April 18, 2016 // 0 Comments

Freya/Anthony Quinn

I  discovered Anthony Quinn a few years ago when he wrote a first rate novel Half the Human Race about a depressed Edwardian cricketer. I very much enjoyed too Curtain Call a novel set between the wars in bohemian and theatrical London. At the heart of the novel is a relationship between society [...]

April 8, 2016 // 0 Comments

A Good Read…is it?

When I first started writing for the Rust I was concerned whether there was a sisterhood advocating feminist values and was pleasantly surprised that Jane Shillingford and others do not bang the drum of woman’s rights. Feminism reigns at the BBC. Sue McGregor is a brilliant presenter, it [...]

April 4, 2016 // 0 Comments

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