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Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

This 1971 novel by Elizabeth Taylor – her eleventh – short-listed for the Booker Prize [images herein taken from the 2005 US-produced movie version of the same name directed by Dan Ireland with a largely-British cast list headed by Joan Plowright as Mrs Palfrey and Rupert Friend as [...]

October 24, 2022 // 0 Comments

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

I had this DVD of this 2018 Mike Powell film lying around in my to-be-watched pile for some time. I was persuaded to watch it as its star Lily James features in the Sky Mobile ad and I like her smile, vivacity and vitality. The film is set in occupied Guernsey. There a book club was formed and the [...]

September 22, 2022 // 0 Comments

Reflections upon the death of HM The Queen

I suspect like many Rusters over the past week, I have taken the news of the Queen’s death last Thursday – and watched all the resulting consequences, including the carefully-rehearsed-down-to-the-last-detail administrative and ancient (and some not so ancient) preparations, traditions, [...]

September 15, 2022 // 0 Comments

In a Lonely Place

Normally I watch a film from my extensive library, rent it via Amazon, or watch one on Netflix more designed for the young viewer. Occasionally I am drawn by a film on television on one of the movie channels and this occasion was last week’s In a Lonely Place. I was influenced by a strong cast of [...]

September 7, 2022 // 0 Comments

Persuasion/Jane Austen

Reading this classic novel raises the question of the extent to which any reader can appreciate a book of little relevance to our times. Jane Austen’s world is the one of the genteel aristocracy – privileged, snobbish, devoid of work – where ambition is social and gossip peddled. It [...]

September 2, 2022 // 0 Comments

Michel Houllebecq and Jane Austen

I have just finished Lanzarote by Michel Houellebecq. It’s a novella of less than 80 pages and contains his normal themes of sex obsession and mass tourism. The story – such as it is – is that Michel, refusing to go to a Muslim country, decides on Lanzarote the Canary Island for a [...]

August 23, 2022 // 0 Comments

Pride and Fall

Stuff happens in life and sometimes it surprises you. I occasionally post a blog to this organ on the ongoing subject of my attempt to hold back the years by conducting a fitness campaign in my senior years. It’s no secret that I’ve have been doing it for a while now, as a result of which my [...]

August 20, 2022 // 0 Comments

Chums/Simon Kuper

The central thesis of Simon Kuper’s book is that a tiny caste of Oxford graduates of the 1980s took over the running of the country and the origins of Brexit are to be identified there. The clear flaws in this theory are that Nigel Farage and the 52% that voted leave were not educated there. [...]

July 6, 2022 // 0 Comments

The way things are going …

Trawling the internet via the media websites overnight I came upon the following piece on the website of the Daily Mail – as Rusters will appreciate from experience, one of the few newspapers that still allow human beings to “link” their stories to pals and third parties – and considered it [...]

July 4, 2022 // 0 Comments

Bad relations/Cressida Connolly

This is an outstanding novel by a writer scaling the heights of British fiction. It begins in the Crimean War when William Gale is tending for his recently slain brother Algernon. He sends a lock of his hair home. Gale returns to his estates in Cornwall but – due to then undiagnosed post [...]

June 8, 2022 // 0 Comments

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