My Favourite Books of 2019

5/5 All Among The Barley by Melissa Harrison If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor Slaying Brexit Unicorns: The truth about our decision to leave the EU by Edwin Hayward The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead What Do We Know and What Should We Do about Immigration? …

When Beckett met Buster and they made Film (updated)

Update: 20 May 2017 Next Monday (22nd) finally sees the release on Blu-ray / DVD of FILM, the collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton. In addition, the BFI package comes with a new documentary, NOTFILM. Pamela Hutchinson extolls the riches of this welcome new release. While it is a joy to see Film on …

Stories, empathy and THE PEARL BUTTON [Patricio Guzman, 2015]

The poetry of Patrico Guzman's latest cinematic essay - THE PEARL BUTTON - reminds me of Grant Gee's superb film PATIENCE (AFTER SEBALD), itself about W.G. Sebald's book THE RINGS OF SATURN. The film retraces a walk through Suffolk taken by the book's author, and mirrors the discursive nature of the narrative in its own approach to the …

Reminded of Laugharne

Last year my wife and I had a very enjoyable holiday in the Welsh town most famous for its association with the great poet Dylan Thomas: Laugharne. I was reminded of this when I came across two items related to Thomas. Firstly, I was reminded by this short article that Stan Tracey's quartet are playing …

Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen

A fascinating book. The opening sentence:- When I was seven years old, my father told me the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades. This book tries to... ...examine why some people become capable of cruelty, and whence a loss of empathy inevitably has this consequence. This book goes deeper into the subject than I have …

Charles Dickens: A Life – Claire Tomalin

This is one of a number of books about the great author published in this bicentennial year of his birth, and the latest in a long line of Dickens biographies. Tomalin's depiction of Dickens is a fascinating one: a man with prodigious talent and enormous energies (it's exhausting just to read about his multiple, overlapping …

Geoff Dyer’s ‘Zona’

My short review of the book published online in One Hundred Words Magazine [no longer available]:- For anyone interested in Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic art-house film ‘Stalker’, Geoff Dyer’s fascinating book ‘Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room’ is a must read. Dyer takes the reader through the film, …

The danger of the single story…

It's thanks to Rich Pollett on Google+ that I watched the TED talk given by novelist Chimamanda Adichie. It is an eloquent and moving account of the power of stories. Adichie sets the scene by illustrating the power of stories in her childhood:- I was an early reader, and what I read were British and …

Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. So says William Easterly, writing in the Financial Times. Having just finished this book, I would add that not only is it a masterpiece, it is an eminently readable and comprehensible …