Locals will tell you that for six months of the year the lakes are in Fermanagh, and for the other six, Fermanagh is in the lakes. Rain sweeps in quickly in this small corner of Ulster. Waters rise and landscapes change. Frontiers are always on the move and borders once thought traversable can suddenly become […]
Review: They Shall Not Grow Old
At first it seems a strange title. “They shall grow not old” is from Laurence Binyon’s epitaph on The Fallen of World War I, but the emphasis in Peter Jackson’s masterly film is firmly on those who survived it: the men who enlisted and went out to France, but lived and came home to tell […]
Review: Outlaw King
Netflix’s latest foray into original drama shines a spotlight on three crucial years (1304-1307) in the life of Robert the Bruce, the king who would eventually win independence for Scotland at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. We first meet Bruce two years before his 1306 coronation as he surrenders to King Edward I at […]
Review: The Little Stranger
1947. A young Doctor Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) visits the ramshackle Hundreds Hall to attend to a servant girl who is claiming to be ill. However, strange things are afoot and Faraday soon becomes embroiled in the closed off world of the Ayres family that live there: the stern-faced matriarch; Roderick, a disfigured war veteran; and […]
Review: Civilisations
Civilisations (Episode 1, BBC2 Thursday 1st March, 9:00pm) is about history in two senses. On the one hand there is the story of the hard-to-define stuff we call civilisation, now quite rightly pluralised to include other cultures, on the other there is the history of television itself. It is nearly fifty years since Kenneth Clark […]
Review: Britannia, Episode 1
We’ve all been waiting to devour Britannia, we history buffs, just as the Romans did nearly 2000 years ago. Where Julius Caesar turned and ran, Aulus Plautius returns, nine decades later, in AD 43, brimming with bravado. ‘I am lucky,’ he tells his second-in-command, the wonderfully named Perfectus, vowing to succeed where Caesar had failed. […]
Review: Alias Grace – the Book, the Woman and the Mini Series
Anna Mazzola reviews Netflix’s new adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. When she was 17, actor Sarah Polley wrote to Margaret Atwood asking her for the movie rights to Alias Grace. That was pretty ballsy. I also read Alias Grace when I was about 17. I then read it another four times over the following […]
Review: Peaky Blinders, Season 4, Episode 1
‘We’re going back … back to Small Heath,’ says a blood-spattered Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), in the opening episode of Peaky Blinders, Season 4. ‘Back where you belong,’ replies Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee) – he knows, as do we, that Tommy can’t escape his roots. Season 3 of Peaky Blinders was about Tommy’s attempt to […]