Psycho
(Dir. Alfred Hitchcock) (1960) A secretary is given a fortune to bank and takes it on the lam, in a wild and foolish scheme to hook-up with her lover; by the time she comes to her senses, it’s too late. Meanwhile, her sister (and others) are on her trail, leading them to the Bates Motel (I’ve been to the Bates Motel on a studio tour: it’s even creepy in broad daylight). Norman, the young man who runs the place, confirms that Marion stayed one night but then she went on her way. But where? And does Norman’s mother know something about it? This blackest…
Continue Reading →The Strange Death of Liberal England
Painting by Walter Paget
(by George Dangerfield) (1935) The 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising reminds us of the eternal marriage of hope and disappointment. Ah, the Edwardian period, and its hopeful ripples beyond, a Golden Age, when the British Empire enjoyed a seemingy endless decade of tea and scones, village cricket, sensible novels and the White Man’s Burden. By the time the Liberals had been shredded by militant unions, suffragettes, Irish nationalists, the rise of militants, the Great War and the nation state, it became clear that the fruits of Queen Victoria had been maggotted by the worms of extremism, never to ripen cleanly…
Continue Reading →Anita Brookner
(photo courtesy BBC)
(16 July 1928 – 10 March 2016) Before carving out a long and worthy career writing novels of clean, quiet, accomplished prose (mostly involving lonely, intelligent, reserved, single, upper-middle class women a lot like Anita Brookner), she was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, a lecturer at the Courtauld, and a recognised expert on 18C & 19C painting, with excellent books to her credit on Greuze, Watteau and David. One wishes she’d continued in that vein, but we admit that her best novels (Hotel du Lac, Look at Me, The Bay of Angels) were a pleasure. Often her stories built around…
Continue Reading →The Midnight Watch (David Dyer)
'Wreck and sinking of the Titanic.....a graphic and thrilling account...
David Dyer’s dissipated newspaper correspondent, John Steadman, defines Philip Franklin, Vice President of J P Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine, which owned the Titanic, by one word – “fear” – when the missing ship’s fate is uncertain and by the word “courage” when its fate is known. The word for The Midnight Watch is “gripping”. Although Steadman is fictional, Franklin is not. The real people from this infamous event – the failure of the SS Californian to come to come to the aid of the sinking Titanic – are effectively imagined by Dyer. None are superfluous. Franklin, a good and caring man, sobs when he has to deliver the news that the…
Continue Reading →“Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends”
Emerson at the Moog in 1970 (photo thanks to Surka)
Keith Noel Emerson (2 November 1944 – 10 March 2016) Anyone who has had the misfortune to sit through a spin of the record Switched on Bach by Walter – er, sorry, Wendy, Carlos, as well as a slew of other Moog travesties (from Moog Beatles tunes to Moog country and western) will know that the harmonic effect of this diabolical machine is as weird as some of its leading practitioners. Keith Emerson, who died last Thursday, was a leading exponent of prog rock, as exemplified by the synthesizer. In particular, via Emerson, Lake and Palmer, which in its first incarnation…
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