Reflection on “Happy Valley”, series 1
Last week, while looking for something to watch while doing a large stack of ironing during the lockdown, I stumbled upon the first series of the six-part BBC crime drama, Happy Valley. This drama,...
Category: Arts
Of mice, men, mockingbirds and caged birds
Today I saw a piece in the Globe and Mail, a Toronto-based newspaper, in which a professor at York University (the one in Toronto) called for schools to change the way they teach the...
Does London need an official Holocaust memorial?
Last week the prime minister, Theresa May, joined her four living predecessors to make a video promoting a project to build a permanent Holocaust memorial and education centre in Victoria Tower Gardens, a small...
Books aren’t clutter and a cactus is just a plant
Today my social media was abuzz with people, mainly women, laughing uproariously at a picture sourced form the Daily Mail in which an “interiors therapist” with a background in feng shui, named Suzanne Roynon,...
Two fundraisers: a well and a mosque
This morning a British rapper, Blaine “Cadet” Johnson, from south London was killed in a car accident on the way to a show at Keele university in Staffordshire. He was 28. Some people I...
Who is the philistine here?
There’s a letter in today’s Guardian in response to a debate about the virtues of Pimlico comprehensive school, a concrete-and-glass building designed by the architectural team at the then Greater London Council which was...
What’s Alice Walker doing reading David Icke?
Yesterday there was much indignation on Twitter and elsewhere that the New York Times had published an interview with the novelist and poet Alice Walker which contained a recommendation of a book by David...
What is a garment of liberty, really?
A couple of years ago there was a sketch on a Canadian comedy show (starts at 01:26), the Baroness Von Sketch Show, in which a woman walks into a clothing store and tries on...
Method acting
A Twitter defence of James Franco (right), who has been accused of sexual assault explicitly by one actress and implicitly by others: If you read closely, it said it happened during filming of Palo...
Otto Frank and the editing of Anne Frank’s diary
An online women’s publication called “The Establishment” last year published an article attacking the editing of Anne Frank’s diary by her father, Otto Frank, for publication in the 1940s after the death of the...
It’s only rape if it’s rape
Last weekend David Bowie died, and amid the non-stop media tributes (which have been compared to the relentless coverage of Lady Diana’s death in 1997, although they can’t have really approached that — normal...
Review: The Theory of Everything
The Theory of Everything is a bio-pic of Professor Stephen Hawking, the British professor of theoretical physics and former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge university, who is best-known for his book A Brief...
Happiness Will Prevail
Back in the 1980s, Doctor Who featured a storyline in which The Doctor was transported to a land ruled by so-called happy people, a land in which sadness is illegal and punished by the...
Roman Polanski raped a young girl. Not much nuance there.
Roman Polanski and the sin of simplification (in today’s Observer) Victoria Coren Mitchell tries to make a case that the situation of Roman Polanski, the subject of a book published by the woman he...
A scientific approach
Taking Up Space: Women vs. Men | You think I just don't understand, but I don't believe you. Cathy “Bug” Brennan, someone who I have heard described as one of the most extreme and...
Horrible Economics
Terry Deary on Libraries (from the Guardian) Terry Deary (of Horrible Histories fame) thinks bookshops are closing because libraries are cutting their throats by lending out books rather than selling them. Uh, not so...
Jimmy Savile: the benefit of hindsight
I watched Wednesday night’s Exposure documentary in which the claims that have been made about his molestation of young girls in the BBC studios and at a special boarding school in Surrey in the...
What’s wrong with the Green Mile?
Last night it was announced that the actor Michael Clarke Duncan, best known for playing John Coffey in the 1999 film The Green Mile, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name,...
Chris Brown and other misogynistic musical mediocrities
Last Sunday night, the R&B singer Chris Brown performed at the Grammy award ceremonies, having apparently been given an exemption from the terms of his five-year probation to appear. Brown is probably better known...
Is £500,000 worth it for Dahl’s hut?
A shrine for Saint Roald and Saint Rowling (from today’s Guardian) Roald Dahl’s family is seeking £500,000 (US $790,300 at current rates) to transfer the hut in which the late author wrote some of...