Papa Soul at the Greystones

5 Aug

Fellow SheffieIders from eighteen to eighty-eight – if you want a great night out with live music from top quality musicians who know how to get folk on the floor and dancing, here’s two city bands guaranteed to deliver. Every … Read More »

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

23 Apr

They say Housman was clinically depressed when he penned the sixty-three poems of his anthology, A Shropshire Lad. But isn’t depression an entry level requirement for poets? Loveliest of trees is the best known poem from those blue remembered hills … Read More »

Steve McCurry in Taipei

31 Mar

[ezcol_1half] Tuesday night – Ellen of A Dot Hostel, Taipei, messages me. She’s off duty but knows we fly on Thursday, overnighting in Guangzhou to land at a doubtless rainswept Heathrow on Good Friday. How will we spend our last … Read More »

Hello Mr Lennon

12 Sep

I think Marco – his comment appeared below a Youtube clip featuring Al Pacino speaking of the time he met John Lennon – must be American. In which case ‘Strawberry fields’ refers to a small part of Central Park dedicated … Read More »

TV Review: Broken

2 Jul

Michael would you fuck me? Eh? You heard. [long pause] I can’t .. [long pause] .. I can’t. I’m sure it would be a wonderful experience, Roz. But I can’t. What Roz Demichel, forty-five year old mother of three, is proposing … Read More »

The Handmaid’s Tale

29 May

[ezcol_2third][/ezcol_2third] [ezcol_1third_end]‘Best thing you’ll watch all year’, insists Guardian critic Sam Wollaston apropos last night’s opener. I doubt it, for all it stars an Elisabeth Moss who played Peggy to perfection in Mad Men. She wasn’t too bad as Robin … Read More »

Film Review: The Handmaiden

19 Apr

But for its thoroughly (post) modern approach to temporal sequencing, the Handmaiden could be placed squarely within the Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights tradition of storytelling, not least for its sexual explicitness and moral point scoring. Set in early twentieth … Read More »