Should Eliza Doolittle marry Professor Higgins?
George Bernard Shaw wrote his celebrated play Pygmalion, on which My Fair Lady is based, in 1912. It opened in New York in March 1914 and London in April 1914, …
Archive by category Fiction
What makes a novel good?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Elizabeth Bennett might have put it, that the novel is a story about people. No-one could disagree with this …
Wonder Woman’s kinky secret
Wonder Woman has been a long time in coming to the big screen, but the wait has been more than worth the while and the Amazonian princess has already …
Cloud Atlas (2012)
The Wachowskis crave complexity. David Mitchell gave them the fix they needed with his novel Cloud Atlas. After the Matrix franchise had revolutionised cinema …
Man Of Steel
After an unconscionably long wait, I finally get round to watching Man Of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013). As this is a review, let me disclose my prejudices up …
In politics, beware the “Lord Jim” moment
Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim contains an important warning for those aspiring to political greatness. Jim is the young man who has everything – good …
How Weird Is “Sucker Punch?”
One of my FaceBook friends, whose opinions I respect, recently described the 2011 film Sucker Punch as weird but interesting, prompting me to wonder: just how …
Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
There are dozens of books that have been on the “To Read” shelf in my imagination for many decades. The older I get, the more likely it is that most of …
Why do Americans (and Brits) love Downton Abbey so much?
Downton Abbey has been one of Independent Television’s biggest money-spinners since its launch in 2010. Sales and audience figures have been specially good …
The origins of Orwell’s 1984
For two years, between 1941 and 1943, novelist and essayist George Orwell worked for the Ministry Of Information as a BBC Talks Producer for the Eastern …