Vikings: Season 1 (2013)

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Vikings: Season 1

★★★★

(created by Michael Hirst)

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while will have noticed that I tend to get slightly overexcited about some subjects. Tudor costume, for one thing. The Trojan War, for another. And Vikings – for which we can entirely blame Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter. Earlier this year, there were a lot of posters around London advertising the new drama series Vikings, made for the US-based History channel. As I don’t have Sky, I’d given up all hope of being able to watch it any time soon, but I then discovered that LoveFilm Instant has the exclusive rights in the UK and so, over the weekend, I stormed through the entire first season.

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One Foot In The Fifties (The Goodwood Revival)

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The Goodwood Revival

(Goodwood Motor Circuit, 13-15 September 2013)

Until Saturday, I’d never been motor-racing in my life and there can’t be many more fabulous ways to experience it for the first time than to attend the Goodwood Revival. For those unfamiliar with the event, the racing circuit at Goodwood, near Chichester in Sussex, winds the clock back in time for one weekend every September and, for three wonderful days, everything takes place between 1948 and 1966. No modern vehicles are allowed inside the perimeter and visitors are encouraged to wear appropriate dress for the period. And so, on Saturday morning under a blue sky (later to cloud over), my parents and I picked our way out of the muddy car park and into the full glory of the past.

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Lancelot du Lac (1974)

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Lancelot du Lac

★★

(directed by Robert Bresson, 1974)

LoveFilm strikes again with this 1974 film, which has been on my Amazon wishlist for almost ten years, ever since I first heard about it at university. As a slice of Arthurian legend, I thought it sounded rather wonderful and yet, for one reason or another, I haven’t got round to watching it until now. With the weight of ten years’ expectations behind it, I regret to say the film disappointed me even more than it might otherwise have done.

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The Psychopath Test (2011): Jon Ronson

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★★★★

A few weeks ago I met up with a friend for lunch and she enthused to me about a book she’d been reading: The Psychopath Test. I was peripherally aware of it, but hadn’t read it. ‘You should give it a go,’ my friend said. But I still felt unwilling: there was one thing that had been troubling me ever since I’d first heard of the book. ‘I don’t think I want to,’ I said awkwardly. ‘What if it turns out that I am one?’ My friend laughed at me: ‘Don’t worry. The fact you’re anxious about it means you’re not one.’ That’s a relief.

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Tulip Fever (1999): Deborah Moggach

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★★★★

How I wish I’d known about this book when I went to Amsterdam! I always enjoy taking appropriate reading material on my travels and this would have been absolutely perfect. Moggach’s novel of love, art and betrayal is set in the Dutch Golden Age, at a time of millwheel ruffs and dark clothing, merry companies in taverns, and maids in linen caps sweeping the steps of canalside houses. In short, it reads like the literary equivalent of the National Gallery’s Vermeer show.

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The Etruscan (1955): Mika Waltari

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★★

Mika Waltari was recommended to me some months ago, particularly for his novel The Egyptian. As he is both out of print and formidably hard to track down second-hand, I had to let Fate lead my steps instead. Last week I found another of Waltari’s novels, The Etruscan, in a first edition paperback from 1959 at the South Bank book market. I just couldn’t resist the cover and so decided that it was time to give him a go.

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The Fall of the Kings (2002): Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman

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© Melissa C. Beckman

★★★½

Riverside III

Following on from Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword, this is the third in Ellen Kushner’s series set in her broadly 18th-century city, around the nobles’ district of the Hill, the warren of Riverside and the halls of the University. The latter, which figured only briefly in the two previous novels, becomes the main setting here. I was rather charmed to find a fantasy book in which one of the main plot strands is a dispute over historical methodologies.

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Ran (1985)

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Ran: Akira Kurosawa

★★★

(directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

I’ve just joined LoveFilm and am busily kicking myself for not having discovered it years ago, thereby saving myself hundreds of pounds on DVDs. I began with Ran, which is the first Kurosawa film I’ve really paid attention to (I saw Yojimbo at my university film club, but don’t remember much about it). I ordered it because I was intrigued to see how Kurosawa would adapt his source material of King Lear into a Japanese setting – Throne of Blood, which takes on Macbeth, is also on my wishlist.

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