Category: Television
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Book Review: The Testaments
I tried to hold off reading The Testaments, but as the hype built and then the reviews started arriving, I gave in, and read it in two days. Few books besides Harry Potter get the kind of build-up this had, including the major launch in London, the pre-publication Booker nomination, and the endless speculation in the…
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Sanditon: ‘when rich people are sordid’
What better way to go into September than discussing the best place to go for a seaside holiday. Where did you go? Where can you stay in a nice house, take the sea air to improve your health, and enjoy the company of the rich and fashionable? These conversations begin Jane Austen’s novel Sanditon, which opens with…
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Book Review: The Great British Dream Factory
Dominic Sandbrook is a historian of the twentieth century, and this is apparent in his book The Great British Dream Factory, reviewed to considerable acclaim when it was published in 2015 (see The Guardian‘s review here, for example). The book attempts to explore the landscape of the British cultural imagination, and consider why certain movements, interests and…
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Book Review: The Arts Dividend
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in Academic, Art, Ballet, Books, Cinema, Exhibition, Literature, Music, Poetry, Radio, Rant, Television, TheatreI think a lot about the value of the arts. I’m interested in most art forms, from literature (well, obviously; I’m a lecturer in Eng Lit) to ballet, music to theatre. I’m aware, then, of the benefits of cultural life: of the pleasure it gives me to go to an exhibition, say, or to learn…
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Victoria, the Victorians and us
I often have conflicted views about books and TV programmes which deal with real historical figures. There are so many questions surrounding how we react and respond to history, how we filter it through the lens of modern thought, which problematises the narrative. These questions came up quite a lot at the recent British Association…
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Life in Squares
Watching ‘Life in Squares’, the new BBC drama about the Bloomsbury set, is a matter of watching people self-consciously try to be unconventional, which is slightly painful. Somehow the ‘liberated’ approach in which, as Vanessa Bell says, if we are not free we might as well be our parents (that is, Victorians), seems stifling and…
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Jamaica Inn
The first of Daphne du Maurier’s novels I read was Jamaica Inn, which thrilled and rather scared me when I first read it, aged about 12. I even made my parents take me to the ‘real’ Jamaica Inn – the old inn on Bodmin Moor which inspired the story (which rather disappointed me when we got…
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The Hour
I enjoyed the first series of the BBC drama The Hour, despite its somewhat far-fetched plot, and had been looking forward to the start of a new series. Apart from anything else, it’s impressively aesthetically accurate, the clothes, the colours, the sets seem to be perfectly 50s and if, like me, you are a vintage…