Author and Renaissance wannabe
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50453/the-mock-song You may not know John Wilmot’s work, and he’s probably best known today for his crudity, but writers as diverse as Aphra Behn, Voltaire, Hazlitt and Germaine Greer all found something unique and admirable in this arch satirist, and his contemporary translations of the …
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I struggled a bit with which of Roddy Doyle’s books to include here, as technically I could just have easily chosen one of the Barrytown Trilogy. A word on those first perhaps. A lot of people first read them because of the film of The …
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Not his best known book but this is an addictive mixture of biography, sociological study and adventure story, flipping from the experiences of biologist Richard Schultz in the 1940s to those of his student Wade Davis, 30 years later, exploring the Amazon basin. It explores …
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You may know this title best from Disney’s ‘Sword in the Stone’, or the classic musical ‘Camelot’, both of which are based on these books, but this five (four originally) part novel was a huge leap forward in retelling the King Arthur story in the …
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A bit of an unusual one here, I’m going to recomment you follow a link and listen and watch a reading of Bluebird, as this is a work best enjoyed performed I think, like much of Bukowski’s. You can get a huge amount from it …
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Just a short ‘recommends’ today. I know some purists might not think of graphic novels as ‘art’, but they inspire and take you to a different world, and the best will remain classics forever. This wonderful drawn series (recently republished in anthology form) originally appeared …
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As I talked about it in another post, I really should upload my thoughts on this film. With an amazing and at time surprising cast (I never expected Stephen Fry or Eddie Marsan) this is both a classic and almost timeless dystopian fable. The mask …
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A slightly different style of influence here. As I’m blogging about my influences, I can’t do anything other than include and have happy thoughts when looking at the ‘Rupert books’. Sitting on my mum’s knee, having these read to me in the early seventies was …
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A Carol Symphony – Victor Hely-Hutchinson [CD – Naxos 8.557099] This is quite an unusual recommendation from me for several reasons, partly because it’s a classical music CD, which isn’t usually my main taste in listening, partly because it’s very Christmas related, and I’m not …
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I adore this film! I couldn’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched it and the cinematography, the score, the acting and the story are absolutely wonderful. In this 1983 film, Tom Conti (who I was lucky enough to meet and gush over about …
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