Review of "The Land In Winter" by Andrew Miller

Poignant book about the life of two couples living in the countryside near Bristol, with both the wives pregnant. One of the men is a farmer who appears to have a Rachman-like figure as his father, the other a country doctor having an affair. It sounds a bit dull, but it's so brilliantly written, and the descriptions of the bleakness of both rural and urban life in what I think is the early 1950s is very vivid. 

I've liked everything Andrew Miller has written so far - I think it's all been historical novels so far, so this was a bit different, but still very good.

Review of All of Us Strangers

A beautiful, clever, touching film about love, death, loss, loneliness. Based on a book (the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada), which is often a good sign. There was an earlier Japanese adaptation ( The Discarnates) which I would also like to see now.

The plot is about a lonely gay man living in a near-empty newly-built tower block in London, who is visiting his dead parents in his childhood home in a small town to the South of London. It's beautiful done, without much explanation of the mechanism but with plenty of mystery, and it's not entirely clear how it works for the dead parents either.

Watched on Channel 4 catch-up.

Review of "Lacunae and Laocoon: For The Triumph of Democracy over Oligarchy" by Molly Scott Cato

I'm not really sure what the point of this book is. Molly Scott Cato said that she was writing a book about fascism, but it isn't that - fascism gets a bit of a walk on part, but there isn't even much about the relationship between it and the super-rich. It's a bit about some of the mechanisms used by corporations to subvert national governments and so on, though it doesn't seem to have much new in it. If you've been reading say New Internationalist, or even The Guardian, most of this will be familiar. Is it useful because it's a compendium and a guide to the existing literature? Not really...it's not comprehensive or well referenced enough. Does it offer a new way of thinking about it? Not that I noticed.

And it's sort of odd that it's so much about the way that the "rules based international order" is rigged, even as that order seems to be coming to an end and being replaced by something even worse.

There's not much reflection on what democracy means, or why it's a good thing...there's some stuff about the rule of law, also taken to be self evidently a good thing, without much reflection.

Review of The Idea of You

Silly but enjoyable romcom about a woman in her 40s who gets into a relationship with a boyband singer. No dramatic tension, every bit of conflict resolved almost as soon as it appears. Watched on BBC iPlayer or something.

Review of "Clown Town" by Mick Herron

I enjoyed this enough, but it was entirely formulaic. MH just winds up his characters and lets them go. Judd is pompous and conniving, Lamb is snarky and physically revolting, Caroline Standish struggles with her drink problem...

The plot is a thinly veiled version of Stakeknife, come back to haunt the new Labour Prime Minister, who had some hand in it back in the day.

A small mystery is why the right wing press like Herron so much, when his stories are so critical and subversive of their cherished institutions.

Review of Crush

2020 High School teen gay romcom. Light and fluffy - somehow the fact that all the teen romances are lesbian makes the film sweeter and more innocent. Lots of talk about sex, but very little actual sex apart from some teen girl kissing, though the central character's mum does some great dirty talking.

Watched on Channel 4 online.

Review of They Came to a City

A very dated black and white fantasy film from 1944, adapted from a 1943 stage play, in which nine characters from then-contemporary England find themselves in modernist utopia. The nine are supposed to represent a cross-section of English class society - there's a shady businessman, a caricature aristocrat, a charwoman, a seaman, a waitress...and so on.

It's very stage-y - we won't actually see the utopia, just the faces of the characters talking about it from a weird castle overlooking the wonderful city. They go into it, and then return to the castle to talk about it. The upper class characters mainly hate it, and the working class ones mainly love it. From their descriptions it seems a very limited sort of utopia - clean houses and streets, gardens, and everyone happy in their jobs. 

The frame tale is a man and a woman, both in uniform, talking about what England is going to be like after the war, and a stranger (played by J B Priestley, who wrote the play and the film screenplay) comes to describe the story to them.

I couldn't help noticing the accents - which along with the clothes, were the class markers for the characters. The posh accents felt authentic; after all, there's plenty of actual footage of posh people talking from that period, and they more or less all sound like Queen Elizabeth. The working class accents felt wrong - a lot of substitution of "eh" sounds for "ah" sounds - did working class people actually speak like that in the 1940s, or is that just how posh-speaking actors thought they spoke?

Watched on YouTube via Chromecast.

Review of "Hag-Seed" by Margaret Attwood

I think that this might be a picaresque novel...it's about a pompous, self-satisfied and lazy theatre director that gets his deserved comeuppance early in the book, and then - after a miserable decline that's hard to feel too sorry for - plots and achieves revenge over his equally awful enemies. It was not very enjoyable spending so much time in the company of not-so-pleasant people, but I gradually warmed to the book because despite everything Attwood is a such a good storyteller. Much of the narrative takes place in a prison, because the central character becomes the director of a prison theatre program, which he uses for the revenge.

Review of "The Historical David: The Real Life of An Invented Hero" by Joel Baden

Easy to read, slightly repetitive book that aims to decode the Biblical narrative through the methods of text analysis...although the author knows about the archaeological evidence he doesn't go there much. Still, it's from a solid historical perspective, and doesn't do the daft "but what was David really like" stuff that some analysis of Biblical stories that some authors do.

Review of The Teachers' Lounge

Well crafted drama about an episode in a modern German secondary school, in which a young teacher gets caught up when someone (A colleague? A student?) is suspected of stealing from others. The film deals well with racism in the school and among the staff, and with the way that management processes can spiral into a nightmare with minimal bad intention.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Corsage

Strange, slow film about the life of Elizabeth Empress of Austria-Hungary. The depiction of her life in the film appears really improbable, but a reading of her actual bio from Wikipedia is even weirder. The film doesn't seem to be very concerned to stick to the historical narrative, which seems odd in a biopic. For example [spoiler alert], it shows Elizabeth committing suicide by jumping into the sea, but the real Elizabeth died as a result of an unlikely assassination.  

It's just about possible that the film is an alternative account of the known facts (rather than a parallel account) because we are shown Elizabeth increasingly changing places with one of her ladies-in-waiting...so maybe she does commit suicide, and it's the lady-in-waiting who dies in the assassination many years later. Of course the Emperor Franz Josef would have had to been in on this, because although they don't spend that much time together they do occasionally have perfunctory sex, and he would surely have noticed.

Despite the slowness I enjoyed it, particularly the depictions of stultifying court life. Elizabeth doesn't seem to have much fun. I note in passing that although the rooms in the Imperial palaces are very grand, the corridors between them are shabby and cluttered with old furniture. Maybe that's how they were.

Review of "We, The Drowned" by Carsten Jensen

Big saga-type book about the seagoing inhabitants of the Danish town/island of Marstal over the period 1848 to 1945 - largely defined by a succession of wars against first Prussia and then Germany. It's also defined by the age of sailing merchant ships and their replacement by steamships; there are lots of vivid descriptions of how hard and injurious the life of the sailors were.

It took me a while to get into it, and I was a bit confused by shifting narrators, but I ended up enjoying it very much.

Review of "A History of The World in 47 Borders" by Jonn Elledge

Read this on holiday, and it was um sort of OK...some interesting geographical peculiarities, some of which I hadn't heard of. I think some of my favourites weren't in then - the enclave of Llivia, for example, a little bit of Spain inside the borders of France. Some others that felt like they could have been left out. A generally politically progressive sort of outlook, but a slightly "chap-ish" sense of humour that didn't land so well with me.

Review of Rental Family

A surprisingly enjoyable Japanese-American comedy about a big goofy American actor who finds himself working with an agency that supply actors into personal and domestic situations. Of course he becomes emotionally engaged with the people to whom his efforts are directed (not the "clients" as such because they are the ones who have hired him to deceive someone else) - an old and dementing man who was once a notable actor, and a young girl who needs a second parent to get into a private school.

Watched in the cinema on the Brittany Ferry ship to Santander!

Review of "Transgressions" by Sarah Dunnant

Not read any Sarah Dunant before, but on the strength of this I will. It starts off a bit dull, about a woman who has recently separated from her apparently rather obnoxious partner getting used to being alone, and sometimes missing things that he's taken in the separation of things. And she's a translator, translating a rather sleazy novel from Czech to English, which gives Dunant permission to indulge in writing sleaze - porn-adjacent crime fiction, I'd say.

But then there's a stalker, and the vague threats coalesce into something much darker, and the sleaze migrates from the book-within-a-book to the main narrative, and it went from being something that I read at night to go to sleep to something that I had to avoid reading last thing at night. Trigger warning - there's some rape, but also some hint of rape fantasies too.

There's a small additional pleasure in the technology, which is pre-mobile and pre-web, even though it's by no means a "historical" novel.

Small declaration of interest. I haven't actually met Sarah Dunant, but she is the partner of a member of the Stroud Red Band, so that's sort of connected.

Review of Bhaji on The Beach

We were after a feelgood film, but this wasn't it. I guess it just hasn't aged well - it's from 1993, and it features a group of women from an Asian women's centre being taken for a day's outing from the West Midlands to Blackpool. It mainly felt like a collection of not very interesting or engaging stereotypes.

Watched at Jane's house, streamed via Amazon Prime.

Review of Tar

Long, with a slow start, but after about half an hour it become absolutely gripping - even though it's about the world of high culture music, with which I have relatively little connection. Because it's also about corruption, and privilege, and exploitation and treachery, and how far it's possible for someone to fall. 

Just brilliant, watch it.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Brides

A surprisingly light but clever and thoughtful film about two British Muslim girls who journey to Syria to join Daesh - obviously based on the Shamira Begum case. It explores their reasons for wanting to leave their families and go somewhere unknown and dangerous - unhappy family relationships, a rotten environment at school and teachers who really don't seem to notice what is going on. They're not fanatics or even very devout.

A lot of the action happens in Turkey, as they try to reach and then cross the border into Syria. There's tension but no real terror for most of the film - it almost feels like a caper movie. Most of the Turkish people are kind and helpful to them.

Watched as part of the Stroud Film Festival, with a discussion afterwards featuring women from the Bristol Somali Kitchen (one of the girls in the film is Somali).

Review of Sometimes, Always, Never

Strange, sad film about a man (Bill Nighy) whose son has disappeared, and how he and his other son pass their time searching for him, physically and online. The family used to play Scrabble - in fact, Bill Nighy's character is something of a Scrabble hustler, playing against strangers for money, and there's a lot about the game in the film.

From the descriptions I'd expected it to be funny, but it mainly wasn't - not bad, just not at all feelgood. The end is supposed to be a sort of redemption, but it didn't feel like it to me.

Watched via USB stick and informal distribution.

Review of "The Time of Our Singing" by Richard Powers

A wonderful, long (one of the reviewers on the cover describes it as "epic" and that felt right) book about music, culture, race, antisemitism and the Holocaust, and how all that plays out through the life of a mixed race couple and their children. It takes in key moments in Black American history, and even touches on some important Physics stuff - Albert Einstein has a walk-on part, because one of the main characters is a scatty German-Jewish physicist genius. Something on how a life can have a shape, and touch on other lives.

I've read other books by Richard Powers, and they were also good, but this shows how broad his range is.

So much to think about - I was really sad when I'd finished it.

Review of Wild Rose

Lovely feelgood film that ended the Stroud Film Festival. I'd seen it before, but enjoyed it a lot more this time - maybe because I watched it in a cinema surrounded by lots of other people who were enjoying it, maybe because it followed a succession of good but grim films at the festival. Oh, and Jessie Buckley now carries all the wonderfulness of her other roles, which were not part of my experience last time round. 

Review of The Half of It

A nice, enjoyable American High School romcom, if that's not an oxymoron. It's a re-telling of Cyrano de Bergerac, only this time the clever writer hiding behind the goofy and inept would-be lover is a Chinese migrant girl, who is already writing her co-students' essays for them with the full knowledge of the class English teacher. And though she's writing the love letters and text messages for the goof, she herself has a lesbian crush on the object of his romantic love.

Anyway, it's a surprisingly nice film. 

Watched on someone else's laptop via HDMI cable to someone else's big TV - so I don't know how it came to be obtained.

Review of "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities" by Rebecca Solnit

I used to write about technology for a living, and I ended up writing about first technology-enabled transport, and then “smart cities”. There’s quite a lot of overlap between these two domains. One of the things that I encountered was what I ended up calling “zombie projects” – pilots and trials that had come to an end, but continued to be reported as if they were contemporary and ongoing. Unlike the way zombies are usually depicted, though, zombie projects were the subject of relentlessly cheerful narratives. Ideas that had turned out to be dead ends, or moderate failings from which learnings could be drawn, were still success stories in zombie-project-land. 

I was reminded of this when I read Rebecca Solnit’s book. It’s about hopefulness, so it’s inevitably a compilation of success stories. Trouble is, it’s from 2016, so we know how a lot of the stories turned out. Solnit’s a “horizontalist” anarchist, and she wants to believe that spontaneous non-hierarchical organisation works well. Truth is, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. It seems to me that it can sometimes work for short term mutual aid settings, and for organising protests, but that it doesn’t for long term projects about political or social transition. 

For the most part the Arab Spring was a ghastly failure. There was a transition in Tunisia, though I haven’t followed up on how it’s turned out now. But in other countries the decentralised non-hierarchical organisation that is so celebrated didn’t lead to anything good. In Bahrain the pro-democracy protesters were gunned down. In Egypt the non-hierarchical opposition led first to the triumph of the entirely hierarchical and disciplined Muslim Brotherhood, and then to the overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood government by the same militarist forces who had been in control in the first place. 

And the protests and boycotts that the book celebrates? Sometimes they were successful, at least in their own limited terms, but the world is not transformed. Capitalism is more powerful than it was in 2016, economic inequality is worse, the atmosphere is more full of Carbon Dioxide…

There’s no analysis of what worked and what didn’t – even though such analysis is possible...Vincent Bevin’s book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” did this in an honest way, though it’s still short on prescriptions. If we keep learning the wrong lessons from our experiences, and in particular if we fetishise some kinds or organisation (the leaderless, non-hierarchical thing) despite experience, then we will never move forward.

I understand that it’s important to raise our spirits, and to keep believing that things might go our way. But transparent dishonesty about success stories has the opposite effect, at least for me. If we are not prepared to learn anything from both our successes and our failures, then we are engaged in pointless gestures, not actual political transformation.

Review of Lute Como Uma Menina

Documentary about a wave of school occupations in Brazil in 2015 (the film was made in 2016), and screened by local radical youth group The RYSE.

The student strikers interviewed are all young women - there are some men/boys involved in the strike, but the film doesn't centre them. They're all passionate, articulate and thoughtful, and it's a joy to watch. Lots of surprises about corruption in the Brazilian school system, and the brutal response of the police.

Watched at the Trinity Rooms as part of Stroud Film Festival.

Review of Shoot The People

Another documentary in the Stroud Film Festival, this time about photographer Misan Harriman, who captures pictures of people engaged in protest. It was good, enjoyable and moving, though I did wonder whether - in the era of facial recognition - it's actually a good thing to put pictures of protesters online. Not a few were wearing masks, but not all of them. 

Misan Harriman is clearly a mensch - even though he's documenting the protests for Palestine he makes it clear he's not on the side of Hamas, or hostage taking, and he has lots of pictures of Jews protesting for Palestine.

Review of Santosh

Really good Indian film about a police investigation, in which the main investigators are both women  -because the case, which is about the rape and murder of a Dalit woman, is handled by a special women's police unit.

The younger of the police women is only in the force because she has "inherited" her policeman husband's job on his death, which seems like a very weird arrangement, but turns out to be a real thing.

It's a very hard watch, with lots of graphic depictions of police brutality, corruption and caste-based hatred. 

Reminded me again why I really don't want to go to India and experience the beauty and the culture.

Watched at Lansdown as part of Stroud Film Festival.

Review of Blue Has No Borders

Nice and rather beautiful documentary about the way different people in Folkestone have responded to the arrival of migrants crossing the channel in small boats, and featuring the documentary maker's attempt to get people with very different perspectives to talk and listen to each other. As the film unfolds there's a lot about identity, and belonging, and of course Brexit. At one point there are interviews (voice over only, we don't see the people talking) with French people about how they feel they've lost their connection with England, which had been important to them. 

The film was very moving, the more so because of the panel discussion with the director Jessi Gutch, who moved to Folkestone from London and spoke about how she'd set out to make one film (about confrontation with the far right) and found herself making another. The panel was chaired by one friend and included two others - I love Stroud.

It rather reminded me of another film from a couple of years ago - Seaside Special, about Cromer and how it processed Brexit.

Watched in Lansdown as part of Sroud Film Festival.

Review of Sanatorium

A really dismal and depressing documentary film about a crumbling sanatorium in Ukraine. Someone thought it was quirky and charming, but it's grim watching. A sanatorium is a weird thing anyway, a cross between a hotel-resort and a hospital, with lots of unpleasant looking treatments administered by weird overweight therapists using antiquated equipment that looks like it belongs in a steampunk movie. Mud baths, inside wrapped in plastic sheet, and outdoors in the shallow waters of a river estuary that is silting up.  The guests are mainly miserable - bereaved, ill, and overweight like the staff - though some of them cheer each other up occasionally. And all this against the background of the war with Russia - one of the guests is a recovering soldier with PTSD, one a bereaved widow, and there are frequent air raid alerts and trips to the shelters.

Watched at Lansdown Hall as part of the Stroud Film Festival.

Review of A Real Pain

Unsatisfactory film about two American youngish men on a trip to Poland to honour the memory of their grandmother. They're first cousins and their relationship is complex - a bit angry, a bit adulatory. But the film has little nuance in its treatment of the relationship between American Jews and their European ancestry. There's a lachrymose scene in which the tour group visits a death camp and it makes them all speechless, but the film has got nothing to say about this apart from the obvious.

Oddly this covers the same territory as "Everything is Illuminated" which is a much better film (but which I don't seem to have reviewed).

Even more oddly there's a scene in this film where the two Americans go up on to the roof of their hotel to smoke dope, and we see them going up the hotel staircase. When I was in Warsaw, on a work trip, there was a fire alarm and I had to go down the hotel stairs, from the 12th floor. The stairs in my hotel looked a lot like the stairs in theirs.

Watched on a USB stick, via informal download.

Review of A Bridge Too Far

Star studded but not all that engaging war movie about Operation Market Garden, and what a dreadful cock-up it was. Not a bad study of military incompetence, but it grinds on at great length to its obvious conclusion, and tries to provide some dignity and honour to the Allied soldiers when there wasn't really much to go round.

Small personal note; my Dad's 43 Group hero Gerry Flamberg fought at Arnhem, was taken prisoner, and was decorated for his bravery.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Palestine 1936

A drama (rather than a documentary) about the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936. As a young teenager I watched Exodus, and Cast A Giant Shadow - Hollywood Zionist films about heroic Jews fighting against the British and the Arabs (not Palestinians then) to establish the state of Israel. I'd been previously sort of unconsciously Zionist - my Zionist Jewish education made me feel that Israel was to do with me, and in some sense "my country", but I didn't think much about it until then. Those films made me a proud, conscious Zionist, and they had a similar effect on some of my non-Jewish friends - particularly the bits in which the nasty British prevented Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine.

This film is in some ways a mirror image of those, and even though I don't identify at all as a Zionist any more, it's still a hard, gruelling watch. It's not intended as a neutral, balanced history but as a tribute to the struggle of the Palestinians against British rule and Zionist expropriation. It manages to slip in some early references to why the Jews were coming to Palestine, and it does capture some of the conflict within Palestinian Arab society about how to respond to Zionism, but it's mainly about the bravery of the resistance. There are some very romantic looking freedom fighters with horses, keffiyehs and big moustaches. We see some sabotage on the railways but not much footage of the struggle in the cities, or of the general strike - that's covered mainly be visuals of newspaper headlines. 

The British are rightly depicted as brutal and cruel. After the film I went home and read the Wikipedia article about the revolt, and realised that I hadn't appreciated the scale of the casualties. Wingate is depicted as a cruel bully. It would probably come as a surprise to lots of British Jews, for whom he is still something of a hero - football clubs are named after him, for example.

There are a few weird historical anomalies and errors. One of the Palestinian elite - the newspaper owner/editor - is found to have been receiving payments from the Zionists; his wife finds cheques from the "Zionist Commission for Palestine" in his desk drawer. But the Commission was a short lived body, soon replace by the Palestine Zionist Executive, and then in 1929 by the Jewish Agency for Palestine. This isn't very important, except that it's part of a wider tendency in the film not to show any Jews at all. We do see a few people in European dress in some early street scenes, and they might be Jews, though there are plenty of Arabs in European dress too. We see some refugees arriving by boat in a very short segment, and we see a long distance shot or two some pale people working in the fields of a kibbutz.

But there's not much sign of the Zionist settlement, though it's talked about often enough by the characters. There's a scene in which Palestine Radio is launched, and the Jew at the joint British-Arab-Jewish ceremony is a long-bearded, hatted orthodox man. There's a shot of Jerusalem railway station devoid of Hebrew, even though the real station most definitely had trilingual signage - you can see it in old photos, and Hebrew was one of the three languages of the British Mandate authority. Like I said, almost the mirror image of my teenage Zionist movies. It does seem as if the film wants to minimise the existence of Jews in the country, even as part of the colonial apparatus. 

The final scene, after most of the credits, shows a silhouette of a Palestinian bagpiper playing what seems to be a Scottish lament. I've asked a Palestinian friend what's the thing with Palestinians and Scottish bagpipes.  

Review of "The Oxford History of the Holy Land" by by Robert G. Hoyland (Editor), H. G. M Williamson (Editor)

 

A detailed, grown up sort of book with a lot of knowledge about history, scripture and theology. Not for the casual reader, I'd say, but no less enjoyable for that. Some discussion about whether the Abrahamic religions really have a place for "holy places" at all in their theologies, and perhaps not enough consideration as to whether the idea of a sacred location is really a hangover from previous non-monotheistic religions. 

Review of Sirat

Stunning, emotionally draining film about a group of ravers in the Moroccan desert. The film starts with a middle aged Spanish man and his young son moving through the crowds at a desert rave, passing out flyers because they he is looking for his teenage daughter, who has vanished into the world of desert raves.

There are weak signals that something bad in happening in the outside world - crackly radio reports of preparations for a major war, sudden unavailability of petrol. Then Moroccan soldiers arrive to evict the ravers, and the Spanish man and his son impulsively fall in with a small group who decide to drive deeper into the desert rather than wait in line to be repatriated.

Saying anything more than this would be a spoiler, but the film is tense, visually striking, and with a remarkable soundtrack. I think it had more of an impact on us because we've been in on the fringes of the world that it depicts - dancing with drug-addled people in the techno pit at We Out Here, attending the Nowhere festival in Spain in a tiny scrap of desert, and beginning to understand the power and attraction of that kind of music.

We watched this via a USB stick in our TV, having obtained it informally.

Review of "Agent Running in the Field" by John le Carre

Another not very good late John le Carre. This is what I imagined his books would be like when I chose not to read them, before I found out that some of them were in fact very good. A clapped out ageing spy in the final stages of his not very illustrious career, put in charge of a London  based department where the not very good spies are left to fester, stumbles into something that might be a bit bigger than him. It feels dated, because I associate the world from which the clapped out spy comes with the past - men wearing blazers and grey flannel trousers, posh clubs and schools - but really all that is still here, it's just not part of my world at all. 

Part of the tension in the book comes from the fact that even for people in that separate world, there are points of overlap with the world that I know - wives who work as human rights lawyers, kids who go off to work on eco projects rather than into the city or the law. 

For a while the pace of the plot and the series of unexpected twists got me more involved, but by the implausible and not very interesting denouement I was waiting for it to be over.

Quakers and antisemitism

A Quaker friend passed me a copy of the new Quaker document "Challenging antisemitism: reflections for Quakers on recognising and responding to anti-Jewish prejudice", asking me what I thought and saying that there had been a lot of discussion about it among Quakers locally and nationally. Shortly after I came across this response to the document by the Quaker Socialist Society. 

I think the response is mainly fair, and I agree with most of the points that it makes. For example, it is indeed odd that the document doesn't have any named authors, and that though it says the writers talked to lots of groups and individuals, it doesn't say who they are. There doesn't seem to have been much engagement with Jewish groups who are critical of Israel and Zionism, who might have been thought of as natural points of contact for Quakers. The Quaker Socialists mention Jewish Voice for Liberation, and I'm disappointed that there is no mention of my own group, Na'amod. The reading list, and the list of groups to learn from, is also somewhat partial. The discussion on definitions of antisemitism, which mainly focuses on the IHRA definition and the rival Jerusalem definition, is both partial and muddled.

But that's not my main criticism. There's a small section at the back that is labelled "How this guide came about", which says it started life as a advice to ecumenical accompaniers who spend time in Israel-Palestine. This really shows - it's too much about when it's OK and not OK to criticise Israel and Zionism, and how that might land with different kinds of Jewish people. Although there is some kind and thoughtful material about how to talk to and listen to Jews about their experiences and feelings, it's not grounded in a proper understanding of contemporary antisemitism.

There's a view among some progressive people that antisemitism is not really a big deal these days. Sure, it was nasty in the Middle Ages, and the Holocaust was really bad, but these days Jews don't face much racism - they're white, after all, and often privileged too. So how can they really be victims of racism?  An addition to this is that responding to antisemitism somehow claims precedence, that there is a hierarchy of forms of racism where Jew-hatred is (wrongly) put at the top. And this is supplemented by a thread about how accusations of antisemitism are used to deflect criticism of Israel and Zionism - something that very much does happen, but surely shouldn't be the first thing to speak about when one speaks about hatred towards Jews. Though it often is.

What I felt was missing from the pamphlet is how absolutely fundamental antisemitism is to far right politics and ideas. This isn't always immediately apparent. The mobs that gather outside migrant hotels don't chant slogans about Jews. But if you look at how they talk about migrants to each others, and to their target audiences, theories about powerful Jews are never far from the surface - the so-called "Great Replacement" is allegedly a conspiracy by Jews to bring migrants in to replace "indigenous" white people. Almost any far right commentary on what's really happening in the world, from Covid to 9-11 to the financial crisis, quickly becomes a conversation about Jews. Curiously, the far right, and antisemites, are represented among the ranks of both pro-Zionists (like Tommy Robinson, and Victor Orban) and anti-Zionists (like Nick Fuentes, and British neo-Nazis including Nick Griffin and the Patriotic Alternative group). 

I won't explain here why antisemitism is so important to the far right ideologically and intellectually. That deserves a separate, longer piece. But it's a big thing, and by omitting it the pamphlet makes it look like antisemitism mainly belongs to history and to conversations about Israel.

One more thing. For a pamphlet aimed at people in the UK it was rather thin on the special contribution that England has made to Jew-hatred - the first country to expel Jews, the place where the blood libel (the idea that Jews kill Christian children so as to obtain and use their blood) originated, the introduction of the first immigration controls to bar the entrance of Jews fleeing pogroms in the Russian empire.

So I'm grateful that the Quakers have had a go at addressing the subject, and I do appreciate some of the good parts of the report. I just wish it had been better.

Review of "Disobedient" by Elizabeth Fremantle

A fictionalised biography of the early life of Artemisia Gentileschi, a real Italian baroque painter. A bit slow to get started, but I was gradually drawn in and quite enjoyed it. Lots of textural detail, fabrics and smells and birdsong.

I felt a bit annoyed by the violation of the convention that close third person narrative shouldn't switch between the inner lives and thoughts of multiple characters, but maybe that's a bit nit-picky.

Review of Bowie: The Final Act

Relatively nice and enjoyable Channel 4 documentary about Bowie's life and career, showing off his extraordinary talent, but also his remarkable fragility - how he wept when his rather dreary old school rock band venture "Tin Machine" was panned by critics. 

Watched on Channel 4 online, with repeated breaks for annoying ads. The voice over explains that these are there, even in the premium paid for version "for commercial reasons", but most of the ads are for other Channel 4 content. Bah. 

Review of "The Matchbox Girl" by Alice Jolly

Amazing, clever, beautifully crafted book that left me emotionally drained when I'd finished it. It's written from the perspective of a young girl (who becomes a woman during the course of the narrative) with autism in Vienna in the 1930s, through the Anschluss and the Nazi period. The girl is sent to the institute in which Hans Asperger works, and the book explores his contribution to the care of autistic patients and his engagement with the Nazi regime. Asperger didn't join the Nazi party, unlike many of his doctor colleagues, but he seems to have gone further than he might have done in sending some children off to be exterminated.

There's so much to say about the book - the clever structure, the narrative style, the characters real and invented, the texture of wartime Vienna - just get it and read it.

Review of "The System of The World" by Neal Stephenson

The third in the series, and now that I've finished it I'm a bit bereft. Just as fabulous as the other two volumes. I was sure that I'd read the whole trilogy 20 years ago, but this one brought back no memories, so maybe I bought it but never even started it. Anyway it's again brilliant, and it's a bit sad that it will never be made into a glorious TV series - but it won't because it's too big and broad, with too many plot lines and events.

Everything is brought to a conclusion and pretty much everything is finished and tied up, in a mainly happy way. Still plenty of anachronistic jokes, which I continued to enjoy.

I was aware that my historical knowledge of this period, after the Restoration and the "Glorious Revolution", is really sketchy - I didn't realise how much I didn't know about the Hanoverian succession.

Review of The Master

For some reason everyone seems to think that this is a magnificent film, but I'm not sure why. It's atmospheric, and the acting is good to watch, but it's also overlong and a bit boring. It's a not-very-well disguised biopic of L Ron Hubbard, and actually a real biopic would have been better. Apparently there's an HBO documentary, and other thinly disguised fictional depictions (The Profit, for one).

Review of Marty Supreme

Odd, long but captivating sports film. It's early 1950s New York, and young Marty Mauser works in his uncle's shoe shop while developing his career as a table tennis champion. Marty is a hustler and borderline small-time crook and fraud, with no regard for anyone else, including the young woman downstairs who is pregnant with his child and the many friends that give him much more loyalty than he deserves.

It looks like an older film, gloomy and washed out, though this might have something to do with the copy that I obtained, which has a watermark and some odd splashes of colour.

Marty is not a likeable character, but neither are most of the other people in the film. Still, I was completely engaged - I didn't look at my phone once.

Informal distribution, with some odd downsides. I couldn't find a version that would transfer to a USB stick, and then when I did it was in an odd unsupported format that needed a new codec, and so on.

Review of Prime Minister

Sympathetic and engaging portrait of Jacinda Ahearn, Prime Minister of New Zealand - who comes across as really nice and normal, even though she has had no career or work experience outside politics. Made possible in part by the footage taken by her rock-solid loyal partner, and by an audio diary that she kept.

For me the most unsettling part was the portrayal of the anti-vaxxers' demonstrations, which wore her down until she was ready to resign, despite a strong majority in parliament. We avoided this in the UK, even though there were big "freedom rallies" in London and elsewhere, in part because the government was half-way to their position, in particular sacrificing safeguards and lives in the name of "the economy". 

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "The Confusion" by Neal Stephenson

I read this twenty years ago, loved it then and loved it on the re-reading. It's not possible to do a plot summary, even if I didn't care about not delivering spoilers. The plot is too big and rambling - not helped by the fact that it's really two slightly linked books, one set across the globe involving a group of ex-slaves in a complicated plot to steal Spanish gold, and one in central Europe involving some jobbing monarchs who eventually become the Hanoverian dynasty in England. 

It's just brilliant, read Quicksilver and then read this.

Review of Hamnet

Loved the book and had a cry at the end. Loved the film and had a cry at the end, though in a different place to where I'd cried in the book. Beautiful, clever, moving.

Watched at the Vue in Stroud.

Review of Blue Moon

Really sad biopic about Lorenz Hart, once the lyricist who worked with Richard Rodgers before he was supplanted by Oscar Hammerstein. Very claustrophobic - almost all of it takes place in Sardi's New York Bar, at the bar itself, in one of the booths and in the toilet. It could be a stage play. Hart is bitter, jealous, sexually confused and frustrated; he's 47 and in unrequited love with a beautiful blond 20-year old, and bisexual before it was fashionable. 

There's a piano player in the bar, working through all the jazz standards, including Hart's own.

A brilliant film, though it took a while to get into it.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of Song Sung Blue

Kind, thoughtful biopic of two artists who make a career out of their Neil Diamond tribute act, and their struggles as working-class Americans - the absence of health care, precarious wages, their daughter's unplanned pregnancy...

At first it felt really schmaltzy because everything seemed to go so well for them, but engagement with the characters was followed by some painful struggles that really struck home,

Long but very engaging and likeable.

Watched via informal distribution, with hard-coded Russian subtitles that only came on during the songs - WTF? 

Review of Secret Mall Apartment

A documentary with lots of found-looking (well, it's video footage from a very old camera that they used in the early 2000s) footage about a group of radical artists who find an unused space in a shopping mall, and then smuggle in furniture to convert it into a domestic space. Except it's a faux-domestic space, because no-one actually lives there, and it's too cold to inhabit in the winder. It's more of a secret art installation than a secret apartment, but it's still fun. The film touches on the surface of the politics of redevelopment and shopping malls without really engaging with it. It's definitely engaging, though.

Appropriately we watched this via informal distribution.

Review of "The Lost Cause" by Cory Doctorow

I like Cory Doctorow a lot, though not so much for his fiction. This isn't brilliantly written, but the scenario of how the US responds to a slow climate collapse is good and well depicted, including some latter-day Trumpists and some bonkers sea-steading libertarians. It's good the way that he explores the appeal of that kind of Blockchain anarchism to some on the left who ought to know better.

Review of The Life of Chuck

Clever interesting film that's quite hard to characterise. The websites describe it as Sci-Fi/Fantasy, but it's not really that. It's based on a short story by Stephen King, so I thought it would be horror, but it's not that either, even though it starts off with an end-of-the-world thing.  It also contains some lovely dance scenes, and some arc-of-a-life things. There's a few plot weaknesses/holes, but they are excusable given the overall narrative. I think you will just have to watch it.

Watched on Netlix, one of the few good films there.

Review of "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" by Sidney Padua

 

I don't always enjoy graphic novels, but I loved this. Lots of actual science, history and maths, and details about how Babbage's difference engine would have looked. Shelved under "teen" in our local library - makes you wonder if librarians just put all graphic novels under "teen".