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Joseph Brooker on 1917

Joseph Brooker on 1917 (2019) April 1917: two lance corporals, Blake and Schofield, are sent across no man’s land to warn another battalion, the 2nd Devonshires, that their attack on German lines is a misplaced walk into a trap. Lance corporal Blake’s brother is a Lieutenant

Laura Seymour on Keep the Change

Laura Seymour on Rachel Israel’s Keep the Change (2018) I was attracted to director Rachel Israel’s Keep the Change (Kino Lorber, 2018, which began as a short submitted as Israel’s film school thesis) because it is a depiction of autism and learning disability performed by autistic actors.

Mark Blacklock on What I Think I Believe

Mark Blacklock on J.G. Ballard’s ‘What I Believe’ (1984) Researching the non-fiction of J.G. Ballard I return again and again to ‘What I Believe’, first published in the inaugural issue of the French Magazine Science Fiction in 1984, a response to the editor Daniel Riche’s

Steve Willey on Reading as a Writer and Critic

Steve Willey on Reading as a Writer and Critic on the BA Creative Writing and English   “The Chamber is a Drowning Thing” ‘House of Commons Suspended after Water Pours through Ceiling’, read the headline on The Guardian (Thursday 4th April, 2019). ‘In the Commons

Joseph Brooker on Stan & Ollie

Joseph Brooker on Stan & Ollie (2018) Turn to Hardy in any alphabetical order and you find: ‘See Stan Laurel’. David Thomson Stan & Ollie starts in 1937, with the duo near their commercial peak on the set of Way Out West. But this prologue is brief:

Joseph Brooker on Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

Joseph Brooker on Colm Tóibín’s Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce (2018) Colm Tóibín’s short book collects three essays published in the London Review of Books, and before that delivered as the Richard Ellmann lectures in Modern Literature at Emory University in

Julia Bell & Jean McNeil (UEA) on Day for Night

Julia Bell & Jean McNeil (UEA) on Day for Night: Landscapes of Walter Benjamin at the Peltz Gallery The process of taking a photograph in the day and deliberately underexposing it so that it looks like night is a tricky technical process, but it produces

Joseph Brooker on A Taste of Honey

Joseph Brooker on a special screening of A Taste of Honey presented by Birds Eye View JO: I wonder if we ever catch up with ourselves? GEOF: I don’t know. JO: Now you’re a real Edwardian, aren’t you? GEOF: What’s that? JO: A proper Ted!

Fintan Walsh on Colored sculpture

Fintan Walsh on Colored sculpture by Jordan Wolfson at Tate Modern A puppet hangs in the air by chains. Its body is routinely hiked up and dropped with increasing degrees of force. It’s a puppet but it’s a boy puppet, or even the kind of