This book is on a subject very close to my heart, and I can only hope my love of these plays come through. As well as my thoughts on them, of course. You may order it from , or from .

RT @phalpern: Wolfgang Pauli's hilarious response to Werner Heisenberg's claims on a radio show that, except for the details, he was close….

Alfred Hitchcock was fine with individual sequences, but, a handful of exceptions apart, his pacing over long stretches was all over the place.

RT @visegrad24: The Iranian champion wrestler Navid Afkari would have turned 32 two days ago. He was murdered (“executed”) in 2020 by the….

I particularly love Strindberg's mad, staring eyes.

Saw Sean Bean play Romeo in Royal Shakespeare Theatre back in 1986. “But soft! What light through yon bastarding window breaks?”. Sean Bean - Yorkshireman - Bastard Compilation. via @YouTube.

RT @DrFrancisYoung: It’s good that universities have abandoned weird dead languages and now communicate in language everyone can understand.

I don't care what they have to say,.It makes no difference anyway,.Whatever it is, I'm against it,.And I've been yelling since I first commenced it,.I'm against it. #MarxBrothers #Horsefeathers.

I really like it that immediately after playing Peter Cushing’s wife in “The Mummy”, Yvonne Furneaux (who really was a beautiful lady) flew off to Rome to play Marcello Mastroiani’s fiancée in “La Dolce Vita”. All part of a day’s job, I guess!

No particular feeling for either of Liszt’s piano concertos, but the Totentanz is great fun!

Football as a treatment for depression? I support Scotland, for heaven’s sake!.

The Big Four?.Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, Marx Brothers.

Wodehouse, for me, is the greatest English novelist of C20. I can’t think of anyone who wrote more perfect prose; structured novels so brilliantly; created so distinctive a fictional world, & so vivid a gallery of characters; & who told us not to take ourselves so damn seriously.

RT @artinsociety: Like Dürer almost 400 years before him, van Gogh found single blades of grass and weeds to be worthy of our full attentio….

Quite unnecessary: and worse, distracting. It’s the text that communicates the drama, not the added music. But still, it was moving. That last scene can hardly be otherwise. 5/5.

I’d have preferred a greater sense of clarity and narrative momentum in the first three acts. I’d have certainly have preferred the removal of ambient music: actors were often competing with that music to be heard, & not always succeeding. 4/5.

Acts 4 & 5 worked better. There were some cuts. The cutting of Dorcas-Mopsa-shepherd triangle was fine, but I did regret the cutting of Perdita’s dialogue with Polixenes about grafting. But the narrative flowed; Polixenes’ eruption was powerful; & the final scene moving. 3/5.

There were too many directorial conceits in first 3 acts, which vitiated the narrative momentum, & diminished the clarity of line. The first three acts should ideally give an impression of an inexorable juggernaut of evil, crushing all in its path. 2/5.

Saw the new @TheRSC production of The Winter’s Tale yesterday. A mixed bag, I thought. The performances were all good, with Hermione displaying more forthright anger than dignified reticence, but the director seemed to me to be trying too hard. 1/5.

Definitely bookmarking this thread.