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.’
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
Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial. By Peter Stott. Review by Barbara Lewis.
A year before the Kyoto Protocol committed the developed world to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, Britain’s Education Act of 1996 incorporated the Thatcher government’s 1986 Education Act that was designed to deal with a perceived issue of left-wing teachers indoctrinating school pupils. Two decades on, mathematician Peter Stott found himself defending climate science against its deniers, who used Thatcher’s legal legacy to take to the High Court their objections to Al Gore’s climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth being streamed in schools.
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
Poetry review – FRESH OUT OF THE SKY: Nick Cooke finds assured and versatile poetic craft in the latest collection by George Szirtes
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, year 2022 • Tags: books, Nick Cooke, poetry