I love the cinema. For a couple of hours or so I can lose myself in another world, one that fully engages my senses and yet at the same time leaves me a curious bystander to the action. Then, when the final credits roll and normality returns, I want to feel touched and changed by [...]
I first heard of the author Philip Pullman when three years ago his book ‘The Amber Spyglass’, became the first children’s book to win the Whitbread Prize. The publicity surrounding this achievement brought Pullman’s fantasy story to an adult audience with much the same appeal as the ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘The Lord of The Rings’ [...]
Television these days seems dominated by ‘Best Ever’ programmes. Best Ever Situation Comedy, Best Ever Musical, shortly I expect to see Best Ever Cookery Programme. What a waste of time!. How can you determine who or what is best ever. Was Pele a better footballer than George Best for instance? What factors do you use [...]
The crowded tenement buildings in the poorer quarters of any major city are home to the old and infirm, the unemployed with little or no hope of work and those who indulge in criminal activity just to make a living. In this world within a world racial and ethnic tensions run high and a gang [...]
Edward Lionheart is the greatest ever Shakespearean actor or at least that is his opinion. It is one not shared by the newspaper critics who giving increasingly scathing reviews of his season of Shakespeare tragedies. At the annual award ceremony of the Critics Circle the prize goes to a rival actor, and in his humiliation [...]