The Beguiled is Sofia Coppola’s take on the 1966 novel by Thomas P. Cullinan, and an earlier film adaptation by Don Siegal, starring Clint Eastwood. Coppola has a history of exploring female sexuality and power in works like The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette. Now she adds another clever and complex study – one with […]
Desert Island Books: Cecilia Ekbäck
I am so, so hoping my desert island will be one of the bare, windswept islands in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Finland. As I am not a fan of heat (nor palm trees, nor sand), I am hoping for cool cloudy weather and big flat rocks. Then I shall be happy to sit […]
Desert Island Books: Nicola Pryce
At first, I thought it would be impossible to choose just five books for my desert island. My head was brimming with countless possibilities, but in less than five minutes my heart had led me straight to five rather worn and browning books. As I looked at them, I realised I had read them all before […]
Zounds! Whatevs! How can I find the right voice for my novel?
Dear Dr Darwin My characters don’t think they sound historical, but their present-day isn’t my present-day: they are Other to us. If I make them sound like 21st century people then the novel will just be like a modern film in pretty period costumes, but if I try to write the novel as it would […]
Desert Island Books: Emily Holleman
I admit my first reaction was to see if there was a way to bend the rules—what exactly counts as a “book”? Can I include Complete Works? Facing-page translations? After abandoning my attempts to “cheat” this hypothetical situation, I tried to balance the familiar with the new, the entertaining with the mind-bendingly complex. (I should probably […]
Versailles Season 2: Episode 1
Which is your favourite Blackadder series? The Elizabethan one where Miranda Richardson redefines the Virgin Queen for all time? The Regency one? Or perhaps Blackadder Goes Forth, the WWI series with its final ascent into poignant seriousness. They are all good but I bet not one of you gave a thought to Series One. You […]
Harlots: Episode One
The opening titles of Harlots pull no punches: It’s 1763, London is booming and one in five women make a living by selling sex. We’re plunged immediately into the vivid world of Margaret Wells’s brothel, as her working girls laugh and bicker over their entries in the latest edition of Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. […]
Desert Island Books: Margaret George
This is fun, because my first novel (unpublished) was about three people on an island – not a desert one but a tropical one so I could have snakes, volcanoes, and so on – and I made it really difficult for them by not having any books at all. By the end of the novel […]