Just in

Arts

Don Carlos/ Brighton Dome Concert

Yesterday husband Ollie and I made a late decision to come down to Brighton. Ollie is keen on classical music, being secretary of the local  madrigal society called the Pimlico Performers. Sounds likes a group of swingers rather than devotees of baroque music, but no such luck!!! The Brighton [...]

May 24, 2015 // 0 Comments

Saluting a classic

They say that simple things please simple minds and here I declare my devotion to the American television animation series The Simpsons which, at times when I am bored or otherwise waiting for something, I occasionally seek out either on Channel Four or on Sky. Decades ago I worked in television [...]

May 23, 2015 // 0 Comments

The special relationship : is it?

A radio programme I always enjoy is Great Lives presented by Matthew Parris. The format is someone advocates a person as a great life and an expert adds to the background. This week the great  life was the US war time ambassador Gil Winant. He is less remembered than his predecessor Joe Kennedy [...]

May 21, 2015 // 0 Comments

Graham Greene and the cinema

I cannot think of any writer who has had a more profound effect on the cinema than Graham Greene. Many of his stories were filmed, he wrote screenplays, he was a film critic of The Spectator and he even appeared as an insurance broker in Truffaut’s  Day for Night. He is perhaps best known [...]

May 20, 2015 // 0 Comments

Right up themselves

Actors and performers generally are a bit like normal people only not quite. Back in the day – and maybe this remains true today for all I know – it used to be said that, at any given moment, 90% of actors were out of work. Equity (the actors’ union) is in a not-dissimilar position to the [...]

May 11, 2015 // 0 Comments

Goldfinger

We were all exhausted by the election in the Rosen household so Gail deemed a night in with the kids obligatory. I was given the role of choosing a film for all. I was deliberating over the American screwball comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World  when I saw Goldfinger was on ITV at 8 pm. [...]

May 10, 2015 // 0 Comments

Elizabeth is Missing

One of the joys of fiction is when a novel embraces a well known topic or theme and enlightens the reader more than any article or report. Emma Healey’s first novel Elizabeth is Missing is such a case. It covers dementia, a subject every much in vogue but it made me aware of the condition in [...]

May 7, 2015 // 0 Comments

The Dead Can Wait/Robert Ryan

The espionage thriller has changed in genre over the years. We first had the public school adventurer of John Buchan and Bulldog Drummond, then the more complex novels of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, more cosmopolitan and tinged by faith; by the fifties the glamorous sexy James Bond seemed part [...]

April 25, 2015 // 0 Comments

For conspicuous bravery

[Above: the action of the night of 20th/21st April 1915 which led to the award of the VC to 2nd Lieutenant Geoffrey Woolley] The extraordinary thing about indulging in a hobby passion such as WW1 research is how often another piece of the jigsaw falls at your feet. Last night I arrived on the south [...]

April 24, 2015 // 0 Comments

It’s just the way it is

    ‘No one in this world, so far as I know … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people’ (H.L. Mencken – journalist/social commentator). ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’ (P.T. Barnum – showman/promoter). The above [...]

April 20, 2015 // 0 Comments

1 … 156 157 158 159 160 … 184

Copyright © 2026 The National Rust | Design by Premonition