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What is art appreciation?

My two art courses are under way – one on Tuesday on The Road To Modernism and the other on Thursday a more leisurely tour over the last five centuries of art. On Tuesday we studied Kandinsky. Our art tutor said that he, Malevich and Mondrian were the pathfinders to abstraction and asserted: [...]

January 23, 2021 // 0 Comments

Blood Orange/Harriet Tyce

This debut novel has been hanging about on my Kindle for some time. Harriet Tyce (author) It was recommended both by a good friend who is an art tutor and The Richard and Judy Show.  I fancied a page-turner after some demanding reading. My critical assessment is that it is indeed a page-turner but [...]

January 22, 2021 // 0 Comments

The gay issue

There has been quite a debate over the wholly gay casting of Russell Davies’ latest offering It’s A Sin. On the Radio 4 show Start The Week presented by Andrew Marr on Mondays Russell Davies defended the casting on the grounds that there was unfair prejudice to gay parts. There should be, [...]

January 20, 2021 // 0 Comments

The Infiltrators /Norman Ohler

I have always been interested in the degree of complicity of the German people – das Volk – in Nazism and its crimes and conversely the resistance domestically to the regime. This readable and well-researched account of two such resistants – Harro Schultze-Boysen and his wife [...]

January 19, 2021 // 0 Comments

Francois Ozon

After early Truffaut I have moved onto another French director Francois Ozon who typifies why I like French films so much. I downloaded from Amazon Prime two of his films, Swimming Pool (2003) and 8 Femmes (2002). The story of the Swimming Pool is of successful crime writer Sarah Morton. It begins [...]

January 16, 2021 // 0 Comments

400 Blows/1959

After rather binging on Hollywood, it’s time for a change and what better to revisit than the French New Wave cinema of the late 1950s? Quartre Cents Coups  (400 Blows) was Franois Truffaut’s directorial debut aged 27 and is rightly revered as a classic. The story is of 14 year old Antone [...]

January 13, 2021 // 0 Comments

Woke frustration

One aspect of contemporary arts which consistently irritates me is the random woke application. A good example of this was a programme I saw recently on Channel Four entitled The 100 Greatest Musicals. I enjoy such programmes for the clips from the musicals and input from film historians and [...]

January 12, 2021 // 0 Comments

David Gresham

Yesterday I watched a recording of the film Shadowlands – the true story of C.S.Lewis’s late marriage to a Jewish American divorcee Joy Gresham. Joy’s son Daniel featured in the film but not her second son David. David was in fact at Cambridge at the same time as me. He attached himself [...]

January 8, 2021 // 0 Comments

Girl with a Pearl Earring (the film)

I was underwhelmed by the film of the book. Speaking to resident Rust film critic Neil Rosen he asserted that this is quite normal and the only improvement of a film on a book was in his view The Godfather Part 1.  The warning signs are in the credits if  “based on the novel” appears and [...]

January 7, 2021 // 0 Comments

An Affair to Remember (1957)

More than any other star, writers like to dish the dirt on Cary Grant, the lead in Affair to Remember.   At various times I have read he was flagrantly gay as he shared a house with Randolph Scott, his real name was Archie Leach, he was a Nazi spy and – unknown to him – his mother was [...]

January 5, 2021 // 0 Comments

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