Review of "Death in Ecstasy" by Ngaio Marsh

I'd never read any Ngaio Marsh before - I didn't even know who she was, or even that she was a woman. I picked this up from a book drop somewhere. I started off not liking it much. Its cast of posh Londoners put me in mind of Raymond Chandler's comment about country house murder mysteries. There are some gay (should that be "homosexual"?) characters who are depicted with contempt and revulsion. 

But it sort of grew on me. The setting - a weird neo-pagan cult in London, with a grifter "priest" and gullible toff congregation - was interesting, and the place descriptions were evocative. And though the few working-class characters are dreary stereotypes, the toffs are not at all sympathetic - they are stupid, duplicitous, drug addicts and drug pushers. It's sort of interesting to see the slightly impoverished lives that even moderately well-off people lived in London at that time, despite the presence of either personal or shared "service flat" servants.

Anyway, I ended up enjoying it more than I'd expected.

Review of "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution" by Vincent Bevins

This is almost a great book - a survey of what actually happened in the mass protests of the 2010s, from Brazil to Hong Kong to Turkey to Chile to the Middle East.

Among the things that is great about it is the honesty, and the willingness to face the truth - that those protests achieved very little of what the organisers intended, and that the fallout from them often achieved the very opposite. For example, in Brazil the mass protests against transport fare increases, organised by libertarian socialists and anarchists, ended up creating an opportunity for the far right through which Bolsanaro marched to victory.

The last two chapters are analytical, in which Bevins attempts some synthesis and reflection of all that went wrong. This is mostly great, except that there's not enough of it. He's rightly critical of "leaderless" and "horizontal" forms of organisation, and comes across as a reluctant convert to Leninism - though those aren't the only options, are they? 

He's also very good on the limits of "protest" as a strategy for opposition movements, and how muddle-headed it is to expect serious change to come from protest. 

I hope he writes another book soon, with more learnings, and maybe a bit less grinding detail about who turned up where.

Review of The Commitments

Watched this again last night (via BBC iPlayer) in the middle floor at Springhill,  and enjoyed it every bit as much as all the other times. Just a lovely, clever, film - not too cloyingly sweet, but really feel-good. 

This time round I noticed that although Joey "Lips" Fagan is one of the main characters, you can barely hear his trumpet on any of the performances. Just saying...

Review of "London Rules" by Mick Herron

I hadn't read any of these before. I liked the two TV series, so I thought I might like the books too. 

I was a bit disappointed. It's a bit formulaic, which is not great. But I just couldn't believe in a plot that was based on the North Koreans activating a sleeper cell in the UK intended to embarrass the UK government by reviving one of its old plans to destabilise a third world country. There are lots of plausible terrorist groups that might attack the UK, but I don't think that the North Koreans are included. So I was carried along by the narrative but unconvinced by the basic premise.

Not sure if I will read any of the others; Le Carre is better.

Review of easy A

A teen sex comedy, starring Emma Stone, and quite funny after the first twenty minutes. Subversive of the the genre, in that there's no actual sex (Emma Stone's character builds - somewhat unintentionally - a reputation as a "super slut" while remaining a virgin, and then uses that reputation to do good around the school. Emma Stone (then 22, playing a 17 year old) is great, and her parents (one of whom is played by Stanley Tucci) are pretty good too. And Lisa Kudrow as the school counsellor. 

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of "The Book of Trespass" by Nick Hayes

A beautiful book in every since; beautifully written, with clarity on the political and historical parts and lovely lyrical prose on the nature writing - and shifting seamlessly between the two without any jarring. And lovely illustrations, because the author also creates graphic novels. 

I couldn't help but get angry when I read it, about the process whereby the aristocracy and their late additions (like the thug Hoogstraten) have seized the whole country for themselves, and locked us out, and how it doesn't have to be that way and isn't in other countries quite nearby - nearby geographically but also economically. 

Review of "It's All Greek To Me" by Charlotte Higgins

I didn't have high expectations of this book - another privileged person with a Classics degree, telling us why what they had learned was really important for the modern world, I thought (see her bio on Wikipedia). And it was mostly like that, though it got a bit better towards the end with some consideration of gay sex in the ancient Greek world. 

My enjoyment was further limited by the terrible physical production of the book, which literally fell to pieces as I read it. Did they save on glue or something like that?

Review of Seaside Special

An interesting, sad film. It's organised around the end-of-the-pier show at Cromer, focusing on the performers and staff, but also some of the other people in the town, including a Tory fisherman. The film is set over the Spring and Summer of 2019, so it's post Brexit referendum, but during the period when it seemed that the political system was coming apart - when the government couldn't get its Brexit arrangements through Parliament. It wraps up with the end of the show and the lead-up to the 2019 election, and I think the chronology of some of that is necessarily a bit tangled.

The subject matter - Brexit, and Englishness - was going to be a bit sad anyway, and it's made worse by some interviews with people who were pro-Remain and didn't bother to vote. But it's sad too because of the characters from the show. They're middling talented, and even that level of non-superstar talent is way better than anything I could aspire to, and their life is precarious and ill-rewarded. The lead singer of the show in particular made me feel sad, because I thought she had a lovely voice and on-stage presence, and it wasn't going to take her anywhere.

And I was made even more sad because one of the performers - a comedian - reminded me very much of a friend of mine, and at the closing credits we learned that he had died since the film was shot. And I walked home in the rain thinking about all that.

I walked home in the rain from the Lansdown Film Club, where I'd watched the film,

Review of "Israelism"

A very good film about how American Jews are socialised into support for Israel and Zionism, and how some young Jews are increasingly taking a stand against the occupation and Israeli racism. 

The politics and personal relations of Jewish critics and opponents of Israel are always very fraught. There's not much trust between tendencies that ought to be allies. Most of us have been called a "self-hating Jew" by someone, and some of us have also been called a "Zionist lackey" by someone else.

Some Jewish critics of Israel think that everything was fine until the Netanyahu government, or the occupation, or...something...and all that is needed is to get back to the good old days of good old Israel, before it unaccountably turned a bit nasty. Others are convinced that Zionism was always not only bad but evil, and that colonialism and racism were baked in from the beginning.

This film somehow manages to avoid all of this, not least by the technique of not having a narrator voice. Its perspective on Jewish angst, on those who support Israel whatever, and those who have shifted from supporters to critics, is to let them speak for themselves, and it works really well.

The film was made before the events of October 2023 and the long Israeli retaliation that followed, and that somehow makes it all the more powerful. I was really taken with the way some of the American Jews talked about their journeys, and the not unsympathetic depiction of just how central identification with Israel is in Jewish communities.

I was particularly pleased (if that's the right word) that the film didn't soft-pedal the existence of real, fascist-inspired Jew-hatred in America. For many Jewish and other antagonists of Israel, the question of antisemitism begins and ends with the false accusations aimed at themselves, so there is little recognition that conspiracy theories about Jews are still very very important to the far right. That's definitely not the case here, though there is some consideration to the way in focusing on criticism of Israel has led American Jewish organisations to take their eye off the real threat from real antisemites.

I was also very moved by Sami Awad's spot in the film, where he talked about his visit to Auschwitz and his understanding that Jewish trauma and fear underlies support for Israel's racism. I've rarely heard Palestinians talk about the Holocaust, except in terms of "why should we have to pay for it?". 

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, via informal distribution.