★★★★
(directed by Brenda Chapman, 2012)
Despite all the serious musing on books around here, I’m really still a child at heart. I’d been looking forward to Brave since I saw the first teaser posters about six months ago: the animation looked superb. During the last few months, it rapidly became clear from the enthusiastic reaction in the States that this was a different kettle of fish altogether from its Pixar/Disney predecessors.
★★★★½
This was one of the first properly ‘grown-up’ books I bought for myself, at the age of thirteen and it had a huge impact on me; yet I didn’t read it again until 2007 and I’ve just finished it for the third time. Overall, I still think it’s one of the most unusual and imaginative speculative fiction books I’ve read, and I’m immensely fond of its protagonist: a compelling antihero. Bookshops shelve it under sci-fi and fantasy, but there are also strong strains of historical fiction, Gothic horror and family saga. And it’s a fine example of fictional world-building. Over the course of the story you grow to understand the political dynamics of a state, and also its relationship with the wider world; its customs and traditions; its language; and, more than any of these things, its art.
★★★★
(directed by Dominic Dromgoole; Globe Theatre, until 26 August 2012)
A visit to the Globe is always a treat. No matter what you go to see, the setting is an experience in itself. You will know it by now, from pictures if not from your own visits: the stage with its golden columns and painted ceiling, embraced by the galleries with their stout posts and hard wooden benches; the pit open to the skies. The play opens with trumpeters and music – there is no curtain – and always closes with a rousing country dance. My seat last night in the second row of the Lower Galleries was particularly splendid, giving me just gave me enough height to see over the heads of the intervening groundlings. I even treated myself to the hire of a cushion (£1).
★★★½
You may remember that a few months ago I spoke of my admiration for Linda Proud’s wonderful Botticelli Trilogy, which follows the circle of painters and philosophers who gathered around Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence in the 1480s and 1490s. Her newly-published book, which can also be read as a standalone novel in its own right, forms a prequel to that trilogy. Looking back to the foundations of the intellectual and artistic world described in the Botticelli Trilogy, it moves between Florence and Prato over a span of some thirty years, from 1434-1469.
★★★★
Serendipity was in action when I decided to move onto this after Death of the Fox. Although Christopher Marlowe is the protagonist here, and events take place some thirty years earlier than Garrett’s story, A Dead Man in Deptford also features Raleigh as a prominent character (though morally more ambivalent). Both books are written in a dense, elaborate, semi-archaic style and both create a vivid impression of late Elizabethan England, although these impressions couldn’t be more different from each other.
★★★½
Early one morning in October 1618, three men are unable to sleep. It is the day that Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh) is due to come before the King’s Bench on a charge of high treason. Sir Henry Yelverton worries about serving as the King’s Attorney General, to condemn a man he can’t help but respect. James I lies tormented by paranoia and doubt, clinging to the superficial friendship of his favourites and eager to be rid of Raleigh, who reminds him of the gulf between Elizabeth’s sovereignty and his own. Raleigh himself, imprisoned in the Tower, finds himself remembering the steps which brought him there, and the lost, golden world of Elizabethan England which made his fortune and then brought it down crumbling in its wake.
International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980
(Tate Britain, until 16 September 2012)
The haunting image stares out from posters all over London at the moment. Even though she isn’t looking at the camera, but somewhere off over the viewer’s right shoulder, there’s something captivating about her eyes. Large, wary and so, so vulnerable. Standing alone by the side of a road, with a rolled sleeping bag on her shoulder, she cradles a tiny kitten in skinny hands. It has a collar made from a rough piece of twine. Two strays, you might say, bound together by a little piece of string.
★★★★
Now for something very topical. Although best known for his comic fantasy books, Tom Holt has always been a classicist at heart and this is one of his three historical novels based in Ancient Greece. Deliciously tongue-in-cheek, Olympiad offers a gleeful romp through the Peloponnese of the 8th century BC, as a group of hapless travellers set out to create a whole new kind of sports event.
The Olympics (and today’s long-awaited first gold medals for Great Britain) have reminded me of my own sporting commitment, which I hasten to add is on a much smaller scale. My charity half-marathon is now only two months away and I haven’t been training as much as I should have been over the last few weeks. In fact, I haven’t been training at all. That’s because the last thing I want to do, after staying up past midnight reading a good book, is to get up at 6am the next morning to go running…
★★★½
With the Lymond Chronicles behind me, it’s time to read some of the other exciting books that have been quietly piling up around my flat. First among them, without a doubt, was The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay, and for that I have to say a big thank you to Susan, for her kindness.
The Idle Woman 