SNAPSHOTA teenage girl is staring at herself in a mirror. She doesn’t like what she sees; fat, skinny, ugly, she looks like a monster. Maybe she should just take a step back and realize she’s not that monstrous. (synopsis via Laughing Squid) Seeing ourselves as we really are is never Continue Reading
Book review: Saving Missy by Beth Morrey
Missy Carmichael needs saving. Though at the time we meet her, at the start of Beth Morrey’s delightfully warm and insightful debut novel, Saving Missy, she would no doubt disagree with any assessment that she needs any kind of help at all. A 78-year-old English woman whose 79th birthday is Continue Reading
Billie Eilish unleashes atmospheric theme song for new Bond film No Time to Die
Bond songs are, for the most part, exercises in euphoric or profoundly-troubled bombast. They are not subtle but then are they are not lacking in elegance either, something brought beautifully to life by Billie Eilish, fresh from winning a swag of Grammy Awards, who invests a whole lot of angst Continue Reading
Trio of TV trailers: Run, Stranger Things 4 and Altered Carbon 2
Two favourites and one new show to add to the TV viewing pile! What could be better? (Apart from, you know, a year off work, a pile of books, your unwatched Netflix list and a stack of calorie-free cheesecakes.) In these cool trailers we get to catch up with an Continue Reading
Book review: Oasis by Katya de Beccera
Do you think you’re a good person? That might seem like a strangely invasive question to begin a book review with but the truth it is wholly germaine to the salient ideas that fill Katya de Becerra’s illuminatingly creepy (in all the best ways) new novel, Oasis. For while on Continue Reading
The wonder of books and dreaming: New documentary The Booksellers
SNAPSHOTAntiquarian booksellers are part scholar, part detective and part businessperson, and their personalities and knowledge are as broad as the material they handle. They also play an underappreciated yet essential role in preserving history. The Booksellers doc takes viewers inside their small but fascinating world, populated by an assortment of Continue Reading
Book review: Jane in Love by Rachel Givney #ValentinesDay
You might imagine that when it comes to a writer of Jane Austen’s towering and enduring fame that there must be almost nothing we don’t know about her. But in fact, thanks to the destruction of letters between Austen and her sister Cassandra, for reasons unknown, and no doubt history’s Continue Reading
Songs, songs and more romantic songs: PVRIS, Monsune, Little Dragon, Johnny Utah, Tom Rosenthal #ValentinesDay
Falling in love is a wonderful thing. And while you don’t need an artificial construct like Valentine’s Day to let someone you love, or someone you want to love, how you feel, it is, like all these sorts of days, a great time to take stock, think about why you Continue Reading
Movie review: Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn aka Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey
If you have ever wondered, and how could you not have, what it would be like to be plunged headfirst into gloriously twisted cartoonish mind of one Harley Quinn, then your answer, all one hour and 49 minutes is before you in the form of a garishly gorgeous film once Continue Reading
Book review: This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
Growing up as the son of a Baptist minister in a family heavily involved in the church, the world was presented as a starkly illuminated contrast of black and white, a demarcation between Christian morality which was, naturally enough, presented as good, and worldly values which were quite obviously and Continue Reading