Get Back
If you were born after The Beatles became ‘a thing’, when and where and why you found them the first time can sometimes be heard to pin-point. They were just there, man. Larger than life. Musical gods. Obviously I can remember moments in my youth which helped inform my...
Maigret
Before the Maigret series of 2016, which is the subject of this post, I had no idea that these stories of Georges Simenon were ‘a thing’ at all. There was apparently a BBC series in the early 1960s which ran to some 50 or so episodes, but it’s not...
Quartered Safe Out Here
Bugger me, this is a good book. Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma – to give its full title – is a World War 2 military memoir by George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, which is how I came to know of...
Weekend at Bernie’s I & II
My recent reading of Andrew McCarthy’s memoir, Brat: An ’80s Story, put me in the mood to watch some McCarthy movies. Rather than pull something obvious like Less Than Zero or Pretty in Pink off my DVD shelf, I threw a few bucks at eBay and picked up copies...
Bones Brigade: An Autobiography
About 20 years ago there was a documentary called Dogtown and Z-Boys. Narrated by Sean Penn, it was this amazing slice of Southern California in the 1970s and how the surf culture of the area bled into skateboarding, taking it from something a bit naff from the 60s that...