Archive for the ‘Cultural issues’ Category
Word of the day: immiserate
October 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I’m reading a book called “Exponential” by Azeem Azhar, someone I used to know when we sat together as members of Ofcom’s Consumer Panel. One of his favourite words – one I’ve hardly seen before- is ‘immiserate’, a verb meaning to make miserable or to cause to become impoverished. It seems that many new technologies […]
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Word of the day: tchotchke
October 5th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
A tchotchke is a small bric-à-brac or miscellaneous item. The word has long been used by Jewish-Americans and in the regional speech of New York City and elsewhere. It is Yiddish in origin. The word may also refer to free promotional items dispensed at trade shows, conventions, and similar commercial events. They can also be sold as cheap souvenirs in tourist areas, […]
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Word of the day: hecatomb
October 4th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Say what you like about British Prime Minister Boris Johnson – and I’ve said a lot that is not complimentary – but his Oxford University education has given him an impressive vocabulary. In an interview this week about shortages in the British marketplace, he commented: “If I may say so, the great hecatomb of pigs […]
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Binge-watching the BBC series “Vigil”
October 4th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I spent the evenings this weekend binge-watching the six hour-long episodes of the BBC television series “Vigil“, a murder mystery set substantially on a nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarine of Britain’s Royal Navy – an original and inventive plot device. I really enjoyed it and, if you did too, you might like to read this analysis […]
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A review of the eagerly-awaited James Bond movie “No Time To Die”
October 3rd, 2021 by Roger Darlington
The release of this 25th feature in the official James Bond franchise was successively postponed for a total of a year and a half as a result of the global pandemic and it comes no less than six years after the last 007 film, so we’ve waited a long time for this. For lovers of […]
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“We’ve been waiting for you, Mr Bond”
September 26th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Thanks to the global pandemic, the release of the new (25th) James Bond movie, “No Time To Die”, has been postponed again and again and there have been no less than three trailers. But this week, the film finally has its cinema release. If you’d like to remind yourself what we’ve been missing, you can […]
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A review of the classic 1967 film “The Graduate”
September 25th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
In its day – I was an undergraduate when the film was released and I first viewed it – this was seen as something of a daring work depicting sex in the suburbs between different generations. It is a sharp piece of social commentary – a critical look at the American middle class – disguised […]
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Why is it called the Green Room? Here’s seven possibilities.
September 23rd, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This week, I had dinner with my son in a restaurant called “The Green Room”. I guess that it is called that because it is opposite a theatre. But why do theatres have a location called the green room? I’ve seen many explanations including: 1) It is a room close to the stage (that is, […]
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A review of the documentary “Three Identical Strangers”
September 20th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
We live in a golden age of the documentary when such a work can attract the resources of a small film and be made at the length of a movie and then obtain a cinematic release. This 2018 documentary film, directed by Tim Wardle, tells the incredible story of three Americans, Edward Galland, David Kellman, […]
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A review of the novel “Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney
September 17th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I so admired Rooney’s second novel “Normal People” (and the television adaptation) that I later went on to read her first novel “Conversations With Friends” (which is itself to be adapted for television). This initial work was written while Rooney was still studying for her Masters in Dublin and the point of view is that […]
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