“There was not a sting upon him, for the smell of the garlic had checked the Little People for just the few seconds that he was among them. When he rose Kaa’s coils were steadying him and things were bounding over the edge of the cliff — gr[…]

23. Robogeisha (DVD)
Yesterday I filled in a questionnaire about Extreme Asian cinema which wanted to know why I might watch something that may be filed under “Asian Extreme” cinema. It was quite a thorough questionnaire, trying to pinpoi[…]

22: X-Men: First Class (cinema)
A film like X-Men: First Class is pretty hard to review. I thoroughly enjoyed it in a way I haven’t enjoyed an X-Men film since X2, which is to say that its an intelligent action movie for stupid people. These be[…]

Something of Myself was Kipling’s fragmentary autobiography, unfinished and posthumously published in 1937. It’s evasive and abrupt by turns: Almost Nothing of Myself would also have been a good name, and it may be that his death is not t[…]

21: Germany Year Zero (DVD)
I’m not sure what I expected from Rosselini’s Germany Year Zero. I knew it was a key Italian Neo-Realist film without perhaps knowing what that meant (my neo-realism begins and ends with The Bicycle Thief, and […]

“The Cantor of St Illod’s being far too enthusiastic a musician to concern himself with its Library, the Sub-Cantor, who idolized every detail of the work, was tidying up, after two hours’ writing and dictation in the Scriptorum. Th[…]

19: Manasse (Movie)
Earlier this year I worried that I didn’t know how to talk about silent films. That I did not feel that I had the critical toolkit to enable me to safely say if one was good or bad. And, unacknowledged at the time, was also […]

“One does not expect the make-and-break of the magneto — that tiny two-inch spring of finest steel — to fracture (…).” From 1924’s ‘The Prophet and the Country’, published in 1926’s Debits and Cre[…]

“We entered the back room where everything was in order, and a screeching canary made us welcome. The uncle had added sausages and piles of buttered toast to the kippers. The coffee, cleared with a piece of fish-skin, was a revelation.” â[…]

For reasons old and new, I started rereading Kipling about three months ago: just as I did for O-Level Eng Lit in 1974-75 , except a lot more systematically this time (ie all of it, soup to nuts: 1888-1937). I won’t be posting big reviews, prob[…]