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Image Description: A canal in Venice, Italy If I had a pound for every recent reference to Defoe, Camus and their novels about plague…. Granted, A Journal of the Plague Year and La Peste respectively, are certainly too close to home at the moment. Resorting to history – in this case, its reflection in literature […]
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Book Review: ‘This is London,’ by Ben Judah In A-Level History I was introduced to the well-used quote from L.P. Hartley that ‘the past is a foreign country.’ Yet, at times, it is the present that feels alien. The imperial splendour of the 200-year old buildings on Strand, Drury Lane, Kingsway and Charing Cross Road […]
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Image description: An illustration of a house inside the Globe Theatre I love going to the theatre. I love lurking around in the foyer, engaging in an intense debate with myself on whether or not that programme is really worth £2. I love finding my seat (or standing space) and flipping through said programme, while […]
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Image description: Family watching TV together in the 1950s Are you still watching? Or are you catatonic, quilt-smothered and crisp-covered, one foot dangling over the end of the bed in refuge from the furnace-like heat of your duvet, and one eye bleakly registering the lockdown breadmaking psychodrama on your mum’s cat’s Instagram? This is the […]
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Image description: Marianne and Connell stand facing each other “Is that really weird?” “Yeah. Yeah, that’s really weird Marianne. But I think I understand it.” That is the premise of the BBC’s 12 part adaptation of Sally Rooney’s acclaimed novel of the same title. The show unfolds the agony and ecstasy of first love before […]
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Image description: Peep Show cast looking into the camera The truth is, I suppose, I like Peep Show. That’s why I wrote this article. I like the show, and I believe it can help people survive through lockdown. Is that such a crime? Should I be hounded to the ends of the Earth just for […]
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Image Description: Spongebob and Patrick If you were lucky enough to grow up in the late 90s-early 2000s, you are part of the last generation that had genuinely good children’s T.V. shows (I’ll make an exception for BBC’s In The Night Garden which was a bit past my time but straight 🔥fire🔥 nonetheless). Currently, children […]
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Image description: Joe Exotic crouching next to a tiger Netflix’s Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness has taken the world by storm. A missing husband, a sex cult, a murder attempt and hundreds of captive jungle cats have made for incredible, if completely bizarre, entertainment under lockdown. The ‘Tiger King’ himself, Joseph Maldonado-Passage – more […]
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Image description: A poster for one of Godard’s films on the walls of an underground station Even at the age of 89, Jean-Luc Godard hasn’t stopped being revolutionary. Whilst many directors would have quietly retreated to some mansion far away from the world of film-making, Godard continues to make films which challenge the watcher even […]
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Image Description: Illustrations of scenes from each film This is the year of Parasite, but it is also the year in which Donald Trump declared that a film like Gone With The Wind should have won Best Picture instead. No, Gone With The Wind shouldn’t win Best Picture in 2020, in fact, it shouldn’t have […]
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Image description: video call rehearsal of Richard II “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this [virtual] England” Not the Way Forward’s production of Richard II, directed by Dorothy McDowell and produced by Juliet Dowley, moves Shakespeare from the stage into the homes of its cast. With the pandemic and lockdown, a new way of […]
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Image description: An illustration of two hands with one holding an ink pen Though much has been said about our abbreviated attention spans during these days, if you find yourself unable to concentrate even on the latest book of essays by the corrosively delightful Samantha Irby or enjoy that ribald, irreverent biography of Princess Margaret […]
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With the lockdown affecting practically everything, many of us have turned to binge-watching Netflix or catching up on shows that we never quite got round to seeing. As nice as this is, the other week I got a bit bored with getting through all ten series of Benidorm. Instead, I felt the impulse to watch […]
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Image Description: Contestants gather together in a moment from the series Lockdown is really getting to me. A few days ago a new show popped up on my Netflix recommendations and, like a fool, I decided that a new reality programme where some oiled-up Instagram wannabes are banned from having sex with each other sounded […]
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Whilst most of the world is in lockdown, literature is still free to comfort, entertain and let you explore different cultures. Here are my favourite books from around the world, to be read whilst our world is a little further away from us. Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (originally in Spanish) An underrated book […]
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Image Description: A illustration of a scene from Mulan Oh, glorious CGI! We are a slave to your technicolour dreamscapes, your larger-than-life monsters. It seems remarkable to me to re-watch the first Harry Potter film and realise that I am expected to be gripped by terror, watching that magnificent blue troll before me. It looks, […]
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Image description: An Kindle on top of a regular book I’m not old enough to pull the whole ‘back-in-my-day-I-read-by-candlelight’, and I certainly can’t relate to the youngest generation of readers who grew up reading in the dark. That last bit I don’t mean figuratively: Kindle’s, iPad’s and other self-lit electronic devices have made it so […]
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Image Description: The Hollywood sign “Terrible things were happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge – impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. ‘Order some golf shoes,’ I whispered. ‘Otherwise, we’ll never get out of this place […]
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Image description: A stack of books on a shelf Quarantine has left us all in a constant state of unease. Now more than ever, books serve as a compelling source of comfort and companionship. Here, I present three meaningful selections that may offer readers a sense of solace, appreciation and motivation through these trying times. […]
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