Category Archives: Books and Films

Blogs on some of my favourite books and films. (Well at least those books and films I’ve got round to blogging about).

Film Review: Casablanca

What makes a film a classic? In a nutshell it’s a film that you don’t mind seeing again and again; you can probably hum music featured in the movie, albeit most likely out of tune, and you can at least quote several of the lines. Casablanca fits easily into this classification. Even people who haven’t […]

Die Welt von Gestern – The World of Yesterday

Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday is less an autobiography more an intensely perceptive historical account of fin-de siècle Europe-up to the start of the Second World War. It may also be the longest suicide note in history. In the book Zweig describes how Europe went from being a place of high culture where everything […]

Film Review: Calvary

Calvary is a gem of a film. For starters, it has the eminently watchable Brendan Gleeson as its star, portraying the linchpin of the film, Father James Lavelle. It also benefits from a wonderfully intelligent script by John Michael McDonagh who adeptly deals with complex issues with a great deal of humour and manages to tell […]

Foreign Film Review: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne

Considered a classic, this 1945 French film, directed by Robert Bresson, shows that when it comes to sex and love the French may seem to be more sophisticated than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts; but that nonetheless no one is more determined to wreck revenge than a woman scorned, even a refined and cultured, Parisian socialite. This […]

Film Review: Behind the Candelabra

If you watch Behind the Candelabra and find it hard to believe that during his lifetime no one seemed to cotton on to the fact that Liberace was gay, then you clearly didn’t live through the 70s. Behind the Candelabra harks back to that seemingly more innocent time and ends at the point in time […]

Film Review: Love is All You Need

Love is All You Need is a gem of a movie. On the one hand it would seem to be a deceptively simple rom com but there’s a lot more going on. For starters, the film also deals with the repercussions of someone having to deal with cancer. Now, in theory that should be a […]

Film Review: Ides of March

Ides of March is an apt title for a political movie dealing as it does with the shenanigans required to become a presidential candidate in 21st century America. Symbolic, as the date is, for the day when Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC. The film shows that over 2,000 years later nothing in politics […]

Film Review: Argo

Argo takes us back to the 4th November 1979 and the Iran hostage crisis. And just like the political thriller Day of the Jackal before it, Argo manages to pull off the nigh impossible – that tricky paradox of being able to create suspense in a story whose ending we already know. It’s a difficult […]

Foreign Film Review: A Royal Affair

A Royal Affair not only tells an engrossing tale of love, passion, politics and royal intrigue but also manages to elicit your interest in the painful birth pains of modernity in Europe (a subject which is not generally known as a crowd-pleaser) while at the same time giving you an insight into a country that […]

Novel Review: Brave New World

Brave New World depicts what the world will be like in the future. It’s 2540 or 632 A.F. i.e. After Ford and the novel depicts what happens to society when Americanisation/Globalisation has reached its zenith. Written in 1932, it’s chilling how prescient the author, Aldous Huxley, seems to be. Brave New World is a world […]

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