Roald Dahl – The Complete Short Stories
(Volume One, 1944-1953; Volume Two, 1954-1988) Roald Dahl (1916 – 1990) Welsh born, Norwegian descent, started his writing life by accident. Invalidated out of WWII from the RAF, he was asked by C.S. Forester in Washington to prepare some accounts to publicise the war effort. His robust but sometimes surreal war stories ensued; he then enlarged his métier with droll and often shocking tales of the weird and unexpected. He was no great stylist: his sentences at times stray into the excesses reminiscent of Hemingway, but the ingeniousness of his little plots and the dark corners of life he illuminates…
Continue Reading →Being a Creature
(By Helen Parsons) (Wakefield Press, 2026) The Books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John tell of the Christ in the wilderness. Luke 4:1-8, for example, in the King James version, reads: And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying,…
Continue Reading →EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
(Directed by Baz Luhrmann) (2025) Luhrmann’s biopic, Elvis – The Movie came out in 2022 (reviewed here), and whilst it was in preparation, Baz learned of the existence of over 60 boxes of 35mm and 8mm film footage of Presley in concert, in rehearsals and interviews. They were stuck in a Warner Bros vault in a salt mine in Kansas, of all places, negatives near to perishing, with no accompanying sound. Luhrmann had to spend a lot of his own money, and two or three years technical time, to have selections of the film retrieved and synced to existing audio….
Continue Reading →The Mushroom Tapes
Conversations on a triple murder trial (By Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner, and Sarah Krasnostein, 2025) Erin Scutter was born in 1974 . Her mother Heather is said, rather vaguely, to have been an academic (“an expert in children’s literature”) and her father, even more vaguely, “a company director”. Although her mother is important in this tale, her father is not. In May, 2025 Erin (now Patterson) was tried for three murders and an attempted murder. Famously, in 2023, Patterson had invited her estranged husband Simon, his parents, his aunt and his uncle, to lunch at her house in Leongatha, New…
Continue Reading →Sentimental Value (dir. Joachim Trier)
[Norwegian, 2025] Nora (Renate Reinsve) is an acclaimed actress. She lives in the family home which changes from traditional, dark and maximalist to sleek, pale and minimalist during the film. Which is better – messy, intricate family life or a cleaned-out refurbished freedom, with everything open to view? Nora, as a child, decided that the house was happiest when full of people, – namely her parents, her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) (Ibsen seems to be getting a workout here) and herself. Now that they are adult, Nora is a bit miserable. We think it’s more than just being Scandinavian….
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