Jezza's Blog

This is a detailed, principled, engaged and informative book about the Syrian Civil War.  I'd been aware for some time that I had a mudd...

A film about the Syrian revolution and civil war, mainly about the siege of Aleppo, as seen through the eyes of a young woman citizen journa...

A film about golf turns out to be boring and depressing...who would have thought it?  This is a biopic of Maurice Flitcroft, a working-class...

How can a book be so well-crafted, and have such a good narrative and great characters, and yet be so un-enjoyable?  Jonathan Coe, who I gen...

Straightforward war mission film about a couple of young soldiers who have to take a message across no-man's land to prevent a colonel s...

  I really liked this...it's not really an introduction to music so much as an introduction of how people think about music...maybe a sh...

This felt a bit of a guilty pleasure - a celebration of Depression-era New York City, with lots of outrageously wealthy people having a grea...

Biopic of Nye Bevan, made in 1997, with a confusing narrative structure (the ailing Bevan meets and talks to his younger self, among others)...

Wow, a small book but a very powerful one. Told in close third person with a central character who is a small town coal merchant, who stumbl...

A much better book than "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell". It's shorter, and better written, and the not-entirely elaborated i...

I came to this book with no expectations - I had somehow managed to avoid the hype around the author, though now I've read it everyone s...

I was vaguely aware of Colin MacInnes, but I'd never read any of his books - I did watch the 1986 film of Absolute Beginners with David...

This arrived, un-ordered and without any note, in a delivery. Of course it was a present from my brother Leon, but I didn't realise that...

A perfect example of how a film can be poignant without actually being sad. A girl emigrates with her family from Korea to Canada. They are ...

Two tennis films in as many weeks, and I don't even like tennis. I thought this one was pretty good, though critics don't seem to ag...

A more or less standard romcom. A young man and woman meet at a wedding, go off to have sex in the cloakroom, but he wants to talk instead, ...

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” So said Gramsci, and he might have been think...

I'd never read any Michael Frayn before, though I really enjoyed Copenhagen , and I feel that I've heard him on Radio 4, in the days...

A film about the father of Serena and Venus Williams (and about them too), and how we drives and manages their career. I'm not usually a...

A collection of short stories, each of which is amazing, emotionally demanding...hard to read them one after another, you need time to get o...