The Legacy of Bosman: Revisiting the Relationship Between EU Law and Sport: 2016
Book
In December 1995, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its judgment in its most...
Amelia Fang and the Barbaric Ball
Book
A GORGEOUSLY GOTHIC, WICKEDLY FUNNY NEW SERIES FROM WITCH WARS ILLUSTRATOR LAURA ELLEN ANDERSON...
A Cage in Search of a Bird
Teresa Lavender Fagan and Florence Noiville
Book
Laura Wilmote is a television journalist living in Paris. Her life couldn't be better a stimulating...
Wine with Food: Pairing Notes and Recipes from the New York Times
Eric Asimov and Florence Fabricant
Book
Pairing wine and food can bring out the best qualities in each. But how do you hit upon the right...
Malta: Women, History, Books and Places
Book
A crater on the planet Mercury is named Maria de Dominici. Born in 1645, she was the first...
Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music
Book
In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR's acclaimed music critic...
ClareR (5674 KP) rated Shrines of Gaiety in Books
Dec 5, 2022
Shrines of Gaiety is set in the 1920’s, post First World War, and encompasses post war life with all of its excesses, poverty, grief and debauchery.
Nellie Coker is a self made woman who owns a series of nightclubs in London. She’s a single mother, and five of her six children help her to run her empire (the sixth is too young). How she came to own these clubs is a mystery. But the chances are that it wasn’t legal money!
Then there are the 14 year old runaways, Freda and Florence, who want to take to the stage to find fame and fortune.
Detective Chief Inspector Frobisher is determined to bring Nellie Coker and her corrupt empire down, as well as the corrupt police officers that support her. He also becomes involved in the search for the two runaways, thanks to Gwendoline Kelling, a librarian who has inherited a considerable amount of money. She’s a friend of one of the runaways sister, and vows to find her.
I won’t just regurgitate the story, that’s no fun, and you need to read this book for yourself! Needless to say, I loved these characters - the whole novel in fact! It’s a gripping, entertaining story, and it was a joy to read.
Very highly recommended.
Oh, and for the book cover fans, it’s a gorgeous one!
LeftSideCut (3778 KP) rated Midsommar (2019) in Movies
Dec 16, 2019 (Updated Mar 31, 2020)
It's so far removed from conventional horror, it's hard to pin to a genre.
It's every bit of a break up drama as a horror, and even quite amusing in places, but one things for sure, there nothing quite like it.
Midsommar starts in bleak fashion, grounded in concrete realism, as Dani (played by a fantastic Florence Pugh) deals with the sudden deaths of her parents and sister. Affected by this understandable trauma, she joins her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends as they head to Sweden to attend a rural 9-day festival.
As soon as the story shifts to the Swedish setting, the tone changes from bleak and grey, to vibrant and colourful. The rest of the film is set in broad daylight, and it carries an extremely unsettling undertone, and as the characters dabble in drugs, a sense of reality quickly becomes disorientating for both them and us as an audience.
As the narrative draws on, director Ari Aster serves up plot hints and hidden messages in almost every frame. The violence is seldom, but when it happens it's visceral and shocking. All of this combined makes for an almost dream like experience, as we watch the two leads toxic relationship collide with the unnervingly joyful people of Hårga.
Ari Aster uses jarring and emotionally charged sound cues to stir up tension (the last few minutes!) and these are complimented by the beautiful score by The Haxan Cloak.
Aster also spoils us with continuously striking shots, providing a really unique approach to horror.
Midsommar is not for everyone, but as far as I'm concerned, it's disturbing, heart breaking, and absolutely captivating - the whole package.
Definitely one of the best films this year.
The Times Great Women's Lives: A Celebration in Obituaries
Book
This selection of Times obituaries from 1872 to 2014 revisits the lives of 125 women who have all,...
Fists Upon a Star: A Memoir of Love Theatre & Escape from McCarthyism
Florence Bean James and Jean Freeman
Book
Fists Upon a Star is the hard-hitting memoir of Florence James, a pioneering American theatre...