A Review: Midnight in Paris

On Saturday night, I went to see 'Midnight in Paris' at my local cinema, and, I have to say, I loved it (and if you read blogs like my one, you probably will too).







Literary Locations - will your work always be better in you live in Paris?

       Many aspiring writers, myself included, have fallen for the idea that to write anything interesting or of worth, you must be living on the edge in one of the world’s great capitals, sleeping by day and slave to the bright lights and pen by night. One must really live, one must really feel, one must drink and smoke by the Seine with one hand on an earth-shattering idea and one foot in a pit of destitution. How could one write in a daylight hours after a good night’s sleep and a morning of adaptive suburban socialising? I must be Hemingway: leaving my wife whilst fighting the Fascists and spending my last dime on the whisky that is ruining my life.







Pledge Your Allegiance

     How cool are these?! Love them. Wear your favourite with pride.

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Literature in Art, Part One: Yohji Yamamoto at the V&A

     Last week I went to one of my favorite places on earth - the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the V&A for short - to see the retrospective exhibition of Yohji Yamamoto’s work that has been on show there since March. It was, as expected, beautiful and interesting, and put me much in mind of several writers, nuggets of literary history and distinctive literary styles, as things are apt to do.*







Book Quote Friday: Perfecting the Voice

     Now, I've not quite finished this book yet, but already it's clear to me that 'Any Human Heart' by William Boyd is a masterpiece of characterisation and voice. Written in the form of a diary, with the odd explanatory insert, it spans the life of the protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, from his Uruguayan beginnings in 1912 to his death in the early 1990s. We travel with him from Oxford to Paris,  Nigeria to New York, the Bahamas to Switzerland, and from London to the French countryside (I'm being deliberately vague so I don't inadvertantly include too many spoilers).

      The test, I think, of an fictitious diary or memoir is whether we find it increasingly and incredibly hard to believe that the protagonist is not really in existence.