Of Ink, Wit and Intrigue (2013): Susan Cooper-Bridgewater

3 Comments

★★

‘You will not like me,’ warns the Earl of Rochester at the beginning of Laurence Dunmore’s 2004 film The Libertine; ‘you will not like me now, and you will like me a good deal less as we go on.’ This, of course, is nonsense: the rake of rakes; the canker at the heart of the Restoration rose; the closest we English have ever come to anyone of Casanova’s calibre… how can we fail to like Rochester? I’ve encountered him several times over the last couple of years, although always in a supporting role: his portrait, with monkey in tow, in the exhibition The Wild, The Beautiful and The Damned, for example, or making a cameo appearance in The Vizard Mask. When I spotted this book on offer on Netgalley, which promised to restore the syphilitic Earl to centre stage, I snapped it up immediately.

Continue reading →

King Lear (c1606): William Shakespeare

2 Comments

King Lear: Shakespeare

★★★

(National Theatre, London, until 2 July 2014)

I’ve been rather blown away by the reaction to my post on The Crucible and am only glad that so many people enjoyed it and found it useful. The secret to successful blogging, clearly, is to name-drop Richard Armitage as often as possible. However, in lieu of any other opportunities to do so, I wanted to write about another of the plays I’ve seen recently: the National’s production of King Lear (directed by Sam Mendes), which is almost at the end of its run.

Continue reading →

The Crucible (1953): Arthur Miller

17 Comments

The Crucible: Arthur Miller

★★★★★

(Old Vic Theatre, London, 21 June-13 September 2014)

Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about suspicion, accusation and popular hysteria has just opened at the Old Vic and, on the basis of the preview performance I saw last night, it may well be the most powerful and intense piece of theatre in London this year. The director Yaël Farber has stripped the play back to its essentials and the action unfolds in a claustrophobic, twilight world clouded with smoke and struck through with shafts of bright light.

Continue reading →

The Lords of the North (2006): Bernard Cornwell

2 Comments

★★★½

The Saxon Stories: Book III

Oh Uhtred. How I’ve missed you. Although it’s now been almost a month since I read this, I can still remember how refreshing I found it. That was during my deadline period where I was desperate for non-work-related reading material but entirely lacked the energy or mental capacity to write any blog posts; so I apologise. As you might remember, I’ve already read the first two novels in Bernard Cornwell’s series about Alfred the Great and the third proved to be just the tonic for some undemanding escapism. There are times, of course, when I want complex characterisation and meaty, intricate plots; and then there are times (largely coinciding with deadlines) when quite frankly I relish reading about someone like Uhtred, whose manifesto is short, simple and to the point: ‘That is my land. That is my woman. I will kill you now.’ Excellent.

Continue reading →

Dragonwyck (1944): Anya Seton

6 Comments
Does anyone know of a better photo of Anya Seton than this showing her on her wedding day?

★★★

It’s about time I read Dragonwyck: I bought it at last year’s village fete and we’ve just, last Saturday, had this year’s fete. Of course it initially caught my eye for its rather hideous 1970s cover, but then I realised that it was by Anya Seton, who wrote Katherine, which I’d read and enjoyed, and so I thought I’d give it a go. Now, I’ll be frank and admit that I didn’t enjoy this as much as Katherine, and in fact found the heroine a bit of a wimp, but it was still fun to read as an undemanding piece of Gothic sensationalism. Moreover, I’ve hardly read any historical fiction set in America (beyond Gone with the Wind) and so Dragonwyck went some way towards filling that gap.

Continue reading →

Pilgrim (1999): Timothy Findley

Leave a comment

★★★★

This was a re-read: a cautious venture back to a book which I was given for Christmas when I was sixteen and devoured on that same day, and about which I am completely unable to be objective. For that reason this post is going to be even more subjective than usual. Pilgrim was an inspired gift on the part of my parents, who had managed to find the one novel which encompassed all my interests at that time. The protagonist is an art historian, educated at Magdalen, who happens to be the world authority on Leonardo da Vinci. It so happened that, at the age of sixteen, these were my three greatest desires in the world (I achieved the first two, and learned better than to wish for the third).

Continue reading →

The Vizard Mask (1994): Diana Norman

14 Comments

★★★★½

Occasionally, entirely by chance, you come across a book so delicious, so full of serendipity, that you can hardly believe your luck. I bought The Vizard Mask entirely on the title and the précis – I haven’t read any of Diana Norman’s other books, nor her popular Mistress of the Art of Death series written under her pseudonym Ariana Franklin. It turned out to be a rare gem: a sprawling, meaty, bawdy slice of Restoration drama underpinned by one of the most wonderful romantic pairings I’ve come across in fiction. The overall flavour made me think of Forever Amber crossed with Stage Beauty, finished off with liberal dashes of Much Ado About Nothing (rather appropriately).

Continue reading →

The Golden Mean (2009): Annabel Lyon

5 Comments

★★★★

A Novel of Aristotle and Alexander the Great

The Golden Mean was an automatic Goodreads recommendation and it certainly caught my eye although, after admiring the cover, I wasn’t quite sure what I was letting myself in for. When I realised that it was a novel about the relationship between Aristotle, as tutor, and the young Alexander the Great, as student, I really couldn’t resist. I’ve been saying for months that I mean to reread Fire From Heaven and this promised to be a fun way to lead myself back to that. But the book proved to be more than a handy diversion: its language by turn thought-provoking, poetic, inspiring and casually vulgar. Initially I found the characters rather flat, and thought that I didn’t much like it, but as time went on I began to appreciate it more; and, now that I’ve finished it, it’s still lingering at the edge of my mind. Let me try to explain a bit more.

Continue reading →

Bitter Greens (2012): Kate Forsyth

8 Comments

★★★½

Once again, it’s been far too long since I last posted, and I apologise for that. Work continues to be frantic and, since so much of my job involves writing, I can’t quite get my head around handling more words when I come home in the evenings. Plus, I’ve been travelling again. But the good thing about hanging around in airports is that there’s a lot of time to read and so I’ve got several interesting books to share with you in the next few days.

Continue reading →

Vikings: Season 2 (2014)

10 Comments

Vikings

★★★★

You’ve got to give it to the team behind The Vikings. I thought Season 1 was good; but they kicked off the first episode of Season 2 with an intense battle scene, complete with shield walls, impalement and Rollo surging around without his shirt on; and things simply haven’t let up since. If the first season was about dreams, exploration and quiet calculation, this second season plunges us into the difficulties of keeping hold of power: the negotiation, the double-bluffing and the hard choices about who to trust and who to destroy. Sometimes, as both Ragnar Lothbrok and his enemies will discover in different ways, the most dangerous of men are not those who drink and argue and go fiercely into battle, but those who wait on the sidelines, and watch, and weigh, and measure.

Continue reading →