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Trump/Biden Documentaries on PBS and Roy Cohn

Two documentaries on PBS on the candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump – and after that Joe McCarthy – were very informative. There is a link between Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump and he is Roy Cohn. Cohn was an up and coming attorney aged 26 when appointed, ahead of Robert Kennedy, [...]

October 11, 2020 // 0 Comments

World War II and cinema

I very much enjoyed this Sky Arts 3 part series on cinema and World War Two. They assembled most of their usual film historians – Ian Nathan, Bonnie Greer, Derek Malcolm, but right wing columnist Simon Heffer also contributed. War films are a genre I like and believe underrated. At their best [...]

October 10, 2020 // 0 Comments

Zoom or bust

I suspect a year ago few had head heard of Zoom, now it is an indispensable communication tool. It may be indispensable but it is not enjoyable. I do not pretend to be any sort of art expert but perhaps its the mercantile in me that makes Dutch art in its  golden age in the sixteenth century my [...]

October 9, 2020 // 0 Comments

Will the real Impressionists stand up?

Yesterday in our art course we studied the remaining two impressionists – Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. The feminists argue the inclusion of Berthe Morisot and Mary Kassatt and, though we did not study her, Eva Gonzales. Pissarro is my favourite. I have seen so much of Claude [...]

October 7, 2020 // 0 Comments

World War One/PBS

There is a tendency in covering World War One to which I plead guilty of limiting our interest to the loss of young life in the trench warfare. This excellent series gave a much broader canvas and I was particularly interested in 1916-18. With war bogged down in the trenches of northern France and [...]

October 6, 2020 // 0 Comments

Execution/SJ Parris

Publishing is very much a copy-cat business. Thus – when one writer comes up with a successful genre – rest assured it will not be long before another follows. CJ Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake novels set in the reign of Henry VIII are immensely popular. SJ Parris’ novels are in the [...]

October 3, 2020 // 0 Comments

Flintoff & bulimia

This is something of a first for me as I’m not so much reviewing a programme I have seen but explaining why I will not be watching one. The editor was comfortable with this. As he put it: “On the Rust anything goes …” I cannot  imagine why the BBC should make a programme featuring [...]

October 1, 2020 // 0 Comments

North by Northwest 1959

The other day a good friend told me he knew someone living on his own who derived much pleasure from Cary Grant films. For me the king of Romantic Comedy was at his peak with Alfred Hitchcock directing him in films like To Catch a Thief and North By Northwest.   Yesterday in that fallow period of [...]

September 28, 2020 // 0 Comments

My not-so sporting weekend (so far)

Come the weekend and no doubt like many sport (but not betting) obsessed Brits yesterday I set my cable television controls for the Sky and BT channels – and, to be fair, also for the BBC1’s Football Focus with  Dan Walker – in search of something entertaining and/or diverting to watch. [...]

September 27, 2020 // 0 Comments

Sue McGregor

Sue MacGregor  is a hero of mine so I listened avidly to the Archive on Four on Radio 4 last Saturday for her celebration of five decades as a broadcaster. It sums up her qualities that she treated the programme as a news broadcast. She was neither bitter nor boastful. She merely recounted how she [...]

September 25, 2020 // 0 Comments

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