Why don’t people close their curtains in crime dramas?
Time for some more crime fiction clichés. Last Saturday’s episode of Beck began with a gangster and his family narrowly escaping being shot. Later, at home at night, he is an easy target standing next to a picture window in a well-lit room and is picked off by a sniper. Surely closing the curtains or blind […]
A great artist
I didn’t expect a great deal from the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the RA, but I happened to be in London on the day of one of the Friends previews, so I thought I’d go. So often I am a little disappointed by contemporary art, but not this time. For me the most moving work […]
Crime fiction clichés
On Saturday night I was watching Beck on BBC4. At one point Beck arrives at the house of a woman whose friends have reported her missing. He rings the bell, no answer, and touches the door which swings open. And I wondered, do killers and kidnappers never think to lock the door when they leave? […]
One of the ten greatest novels in the French language?
That was Gide’s view of Émile Zola’s 1885 novel, Germinal. And what a stupendous work it is. I read the Penguin edition in an excellent translation by Roger Pearson. (Alas my French couldn’t cope with this 532 page novel with its complex – though always accessible – descriptions of mining technology). It tells the story of […]
Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald
This is the first biography I have read of someone that I’ve actually known. Penelope Fitzgerald was an active member of the William Morris Society of which I was curator, and later vice-chair and then chair in the late 1980s and the 1990s. My memories of her include standing with her on a bitterly cold […]