The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford: Book Review

What a spectacularly good book, how unspeakably cruel, how beautiful! What a titanic achievement, what flawlessness! What stupidly blind, incandescently passionate, seethingly brutal, harrowingly evil, innocently pure characters! I’m transfixed, mesmerised and utterly seduced. Ladies and gentlemen: The Good Soldier by the incomparable Ford Madox Ford. On the surface, this is the story of a…

Growing up Austen: a Pride and Prejudice kid wishes the great novel a happy 200th birthday.

I can’t recall a time in my life when I didn’t know about Pride and Prejudice. This was entirely thanks to my Mom, an Austen junkie if ever there was one, who was hopelessly addicted to the immortal 1995 BBC adaptation and made it a feature of every holiday and long weekend without fail. I…

Paradise Lost: Silent Witness S15E5+6 – Review

This week’s Silent Witness is a merciful return to brilliance after last week’s yawn-fest and fits neatly into the great crime tradition of serial killers inspired by literature with great originality, replacing the usual culprit (Dante’s Inferno) with a new, but infinitely appropriate one – Paradise Lost. In this episode, an annoyed Nikki’s chance encounter…

Parade’s End Book 4 Review: The Last Post

The Last Post is Ford Madox Ford’s Titus Alone: the final book that most readers forget about and that most editors don’t want them to read anyway. It’s very different from its predecessors, and it’s also ‘disappointing’ (please note inverted commas) in that it risks spoiling everything the reader has been through with Christopher and…

The 10 Best Sherlock Holmes Fanvids on YouTube

Let us praise the faceless rock stars and the consummate artists that most of us only know through an alias: the YouTube vidders who open up the many dimensions of Holmes and permit us to see into them as they do. Collected here are my top ten Sherlock Holmes fanvids from the timeless interpretations of Jeremy Brett…

The People’s Musical: A Review of Les Misérables

In a recent red carpet interview, Anne Hathaway referred to Les Misérables as ‘the people’s musical’, and nothing proves the sensitivity and truth of that insight more than the landscape of this extraordinary film, in which crowds of the poor and the desperate, reduced to a sea of colour and clawing hands, push ever closer…

And Then I Fell In Love…Silent Witness S15E3+4 – Review

It is perhaps understandable that after last week’s labyrinthine plot, the producers of Silent Witness thought going for something a lot simpler in this week’s episode would help give the audience a bit of a rest before things get really dark again: the TV equivalent of the gatekeeper scene in Macbeth. They have, to a…

WTF: why I barely survived the first 5 minutes of Elementary

While I cannot make bricks without clay, I also don’t care to be too timid in drawing my inferences. So, after watching approximately 5 minutes of CBS’ new modern day Sherlock Holmes adaptation, this self-confessed Sherlock and Holmes addict turned off the TV (throwing something at it would have knocked it off its ledge, you…

Parade’s End Book 3 Review: A Man Could Stand Up –

A Man Could Stand Up – resembles a slight but moving intermezzo leading up to a grand conclusion. Ford Madox Ford thankfully relieves us of spending more time with the exhausting Sylvia Tietjens in constructing a book in three parts in which Christopher and Valentine gradually move so much closer together, intellectually and spiritually, that…

Death Has No Dominion: Silent Witness S15E1+2* – Review

The dominant theme pervading each aspect of last season’s premier was depression: this time, it’s death, as Nikki, Harry and Leo navigate a grey mist of suicide, serial murder and loss in this complex opener of Silent Witness season 15. The many tiny, silken and vitally important threads of the episode’s spider web plot are…