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The Undoing

I very much enjoyed this psychological thriller on SKY ATLANTIC. It’s set in New York and stars Hugh Grant as Jonathan Fraser, a paediatric encologist, and Nicole Kidman, his wife Grace a psychiatrist, specialising in marital breakdown. Both actors starred as villains in the excellent [...]

October 27, 2020 // 0 Comments

Rebecca/Netflix

If you have not seen the Alfred Hitchcock 1940 version with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, nor read Daphne du Maurier’s novel, you might enjoy this recent adaptation which director Ben Wheatley is anxious to point out is not a remake. The plot of two Mrs de Winters – one dying in a [...]

October 23, 2020 // 0 Comments

Billion Dollar Heist/BBC 4

The difficulty with this BBC4 Programme broadcast on Monday is that at the end of it you had no clear idea as to the whereabouts of the Vermeer and Rembrandt paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart  Gardner museum in Boston or who committed the theft. The FBI agent believed them to be in [...]

October 21, 2020 // 0 Comments

Book review (a curate’s egg)

I bought Robert Colls’ new book This Sporting Life: Sport & Liberty in England, 1760-1960 about three months ago after both reading a review of it in one of the Sunday newspapers and having it recommended to me by a pal because of my general interest in boxing and its forebear – [...]

October 21, 2020 // 0 Comments

Contrasting tv dramas

Over the weekend I watched Roadkill, Montalbano and The Bridge. Within minutes of watching Roadkill I could see what we were in for. The playwright Sir David Hare is known for his left wing views and his subject was a hypocritical amoral Tory minister Peter Laurence. The first scene featured him [...]

October 20, 2020 // 0 Comments

Daphne du Maurier

In the week there was a revealing documentary on Daphne du Maurier on PBS America entitled In Rebecca’s Footsteps. She was a complex character difficult to classify as a writer. The popular notion is of a historical romantic novelist in the style of Georgette Heyer or Philippa Gregory. In fact [...]

October 18, 2020 // 0 Comments

Legacy of Agatha Christie

Last Saturday there was a tribute on Channel 5 to Agatha Christie to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles.   The programme was narrated by Nigel Havers and various actors who had appeared in televised adaptations – and the [...]

October 14, 2020 // 0 Comments

Magdalene triumphant in University Challenge

I was delighted to see my old college Magdalene Cambridge beat University College Oxford in University Challenge 170-130 last night. It was nip and tuck till the end, when a couple of interruptions by University cost them point deductions, and Magdalene then hogged the questions. I was wondering [...]

October 13, 2020 // 0 Comments

Six months and counting into it

Last weekend I joined an informal and thoroughly enjoyable Zoom meeting of half a dozen erstwhile contributors to the Rust – two of whom I have never met in the flesh – at which we just socialised, caught up with each other’s personal news and discussed the extent to which the Covid-19 crisis [...]

October 13, 2020 // 0 Comments

Facing the facts

It fascinates me how the human race always presumes in the present that life as it is will never change and yet simultaneously also manages to embrace the new – technology, fashion, media obsessions, medical breakthroughs et al. – as it comes along with varying degrees of enthusiasm ranging [...]

October 12, 2020 // 0 Comments

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