Les Enfants Terribles (Melville) 1950 BFI Blu Ray 2021. When critics write of Les Enfants Terrible, Jean-Pierre Melville’s superlative film of Jean Cocteau’s novel, they use terms like “sibling rivalry” and “an obsessive incestuous relationship.’
year 2021
The Great Melt By Alister Doyle Published by Flint Books My only churlish quibble with Alister Doyle’s highly readable distillation of years of meticulous research into climate change and sea level rise is that it might make the reader desperate for the kind of far-flung adventures we can no longer undertake lightly.
Poetry Review- GREEDY COW: Paul McDonald reviews Fiona Sinclair’s funny and lucid accounts of episodes in a late-in-life romance
Poetry review – OAK: Edmund Prestwich is captivated by an imaginative poem-biography of an oak tree by Katharine Towers
P – Michael Bartholomew-Biggs reviews a classic dystopia by D Rudd-Mitchell in which the individual is faced with a seemingly all-powerful Party
Hogarth and Europe: Uncovering City Life. Tate Britain Until 22 March 2022. Review by Carla Scarano.
The exhibition highlights Hogarth’s artistic connections with his European contemporary artists and his satirical depiction and moral flogging of Georgian Britain.
Poetry review – BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO LOSS IN THE MULTIVERSE: Charles Rammelkamp studies Claudine Nash‘s sympathetic and light-touch guide to coping with bereavement
The Wife of Willesden. Adapted by Zadie Smith from Chaucer’s ‘The Wife of Bath’. Kiln Theatre, London. Until 18 December 2021. Review by Carla Scarano.
Zadie Smith’s brilliant adaptation of ‘The Wife of Bath’ from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales triggers a rethinking of women’s roles in society.
REBEL TALK – Bill Jenkinson surveys a collection of poems on the climate emergency compiled and edited by Rip Bulkeley
Merryn Williams peruses this year’s George Crabbe Poetry Competition Anthology
Hokusai: The Great Book of Everything. Review by Carla Scarano. A selection of 103 drawings from Katsushika Hokusai’s encyclopaedic book of pictures is on display for the first time, at The British Museum in room 90. This unique and ambitious collection was composed between the 1820s and the 1840s and survived because the book was never published.
Simenon The Man, The Books, The Films by Barry Forshaw. Review by Alan Price. I came very late in the day to the works of Georges Simenon. It was five years ago whilst talking, with a friend, about the early 1960’s BBC TV series of Maigret when I picked up my first Maigret novel. It was The Misty Harbour (1932). This story of a disturbed man found wandering the streets of Paris, with no recollection of who he is or how he got there was remarkably compelling.
By Alan Price • authors, books, television, writing, year 2021 • Tags: Alan Price, authors, books, television, writing