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The Admirable Crichton (1957)

I livened up Monday morning by watching this film, directed by Lewis Gilbert, on Film 4 yesterday. Dramas on service and class have always been popular. Think of Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey and Remains of the Day.   In many ways the genre all started with the J.M. Barrie play and Lewis [...]

October 31, 2023 // 0 Comments

Answered prayers/Duncan Hamilton

Duncan Hamilton is rightly acclaimed as one of our best – if not the best – sports biographer. It’s not a literary field crammed with talent. Most ghosted sports biographies are dull with some revelation for the serialisation in a newspaper. Duncan Hamilton writes on major but [...]

September 19, 2023 // 0 Comments

Barbie: a sort of a movie review

In keeping with the traditions of this great organ – one of which is that any contributor can write upon any subject – I feel it incumbent upon me to begin today’s offering with the twin admissions that personally I am neither the Rust’s film correspondent, a title which rightly [...]

August 10, 2023 // 0 Comments

Isata Kanneh-Mason & the Proms

The Proms are a welcome and regular feature of the British summer. They are experimental and a platform for new and younger talent but not too woke-ish. Last Sunday I watched on the TV a prom featuring Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky. The virtuoso pianist for the Prokofiev piece [...]

August 9, 2023 // 0 Comments

A la Colthard/Eating out in Chichester.

Chichester is renowned for its cathedral, theatre and art gallery – but not its restaurants. I accompanied Alice (Mansfield) on Tuesday to the Pallant Gallery.  I enjoyed the Gwen John exhibition and particularly her draughtmanship. Can one use that word now or should it be [...]

August 3, 2023 // 0 Comments

Gwen John/Art and Life in London and Paris/Pallant Gallery

Most art critics are women and most of these carry a feminist agenda which runs that female artists  were oppressed and unrated by their male counterparts. Thus, the conventional narrative is that Gwen John’s more celebrated younger brother Augustus deliberately overshadowed her career though he [...]

August 2, 2023 // 0 Comments

Another day at the home office

Coming to readers of The Rust from the “You Just Couldn’t Make It Up” department: Writing as someone in my eighth decade, I hereby forgive in advance all Rusters of more junior years for either passing straight on to the next piece of wisdom from this mighty organ and/or heaving a sigh of [...]

June 24, 2023 // 0 Comments

The Age of Innocence/Edith Wharton

Having enjoyed The Reef I moved onto Edith Wharton’s best-known work The Age of Innocence. Published in 1920 when she was 58 it won her the Pulitzer prize , the first woman to achieve this. The central character is Archer Newland, a young and rich lawyer, and the novel is set in the Gilded Age of [...]

May 25, 2023 // 0 Comments

A return to the fold …

I have not exactly troubled the scorer much with the frequency of my blogs to the Rust recently but today I thought I’d share a pair of reflections upon things that have happened or occurred to me in the past week or so. TEN THOUSAND STEPS PER DAY Firstly, yesterday I reached the milestone of [...]

May 6, 2023 // 0 Comments

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