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  • amateur51

    Originally posted by vinteuil View Post
    ... hmmm, seventy five books at a fiver a-piece - £375. Just as well you are bestest chums with Irritable Duncan-Syndrome ...

    Mind you, I was lucky in picking up the twenty-five vols of the Complete Works - Maigret and non-Maigret - (Presses de la Cité - collection omnibus) for £80 some years back :smug face emoticon:
    A fiver per month over seventy-five months is scarcely a King's (or a Queen's ) ransome.

    However I shall of course be suggesting that my local library should purchase the series

    That emoticon is a tad tautologous, innit vints?

    Comment

    • Nick Armstrong
      Host
      • Nov 2010
      • 26538

      Originally posted by amateur51 View Post
      That emoticon is a tad tautologous, innit vints?
      ... said amateur, poking his stick provocatively through the bars of the cage...

      To my shame I didn't know or had totally forgotten that Patrice Leconte's wonderful film Monsieur Hire

      Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a


      was based on a Simenon book

      Originally posted by vinteuil View Post
      Les fiançailles de Monsieur Hire

      Michel Blanc's performance is just about as creepy yet heartrending as anything I know on film...
      "...the isle is full of noises,
      Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
      Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
      Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."

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      • amateur51

        Originally posted by Caliban View Post
        ... said amateur, poking his stuck provocatively through the bars of the cage...
        You'll have us all hurled into the deepest darkest pit known to french frank if you carries on like that, Master Pip

        And she knows a few

        Comment

        • vinteuil
          Full Member
          • Nov 2010
          • 12842

          Originally posted by Caliban View Post
          Patrice Leconte...

          ... who also made another of my fave fillums -


          Imagine a time when all compliments are two-faced, when every truth is tinged with irony, when insults are the currency of humor. We have more in common with

          Comment

          • Nick Armstrong
            Host
            • Nov 2010
            • 26538

            Originally posted by amateur51 View Post
            You'll have us all hurled into the deepest darkest pit known to french frank if you carries on like that, Master Pip
            "You may be sure, dear Joe," I went on, after we had shaken hands, "that I shall never forget you."


            "...the isle is full of noises,
            Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
            Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
            Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."

            Comment

            • Nick Armstrong
              Host
              • Nov 2010
              • 26538

              Originally posted by vinteuil View Post
              ... who also made another of my fave fillums -


              http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ridicule-1996

              Indeed - delicious stuff - with the resonantly-named Fanny Ardant...

              And his

              The hairdressing shop is their ocean liner, their lives are a cruise around the world. They will sail the Nile, kiss in the shadows of the Great Pyramids, see


              is a gem too...
              "...the isle is full of noises,
              Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
              Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
              Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."

              Comment

              • french frank
                Administrator/Moderator
                • Feb 2007
                • 30301

                Intriguing book which I didn't know at all has been the Christmas present of no. 3 nephew: Four Hedges by Clare Leighton which was reprinted a couple of years ago having first been published in 1935. CL was the partner of the socialist journalist Noel Brailsford, and a wood engraver. This book is illustrated throughout with her engravings, mainly of plants and wildlife, accompanying the account of taming/cultivating her garden in the Chilterns throughout the year.

                If you know the 1940 edition of Housman's A Shropshire Lad, illustrated by Agnes Miller Parker, Leighton's engravings of people are amazingly like Parker's.
                It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.

                Comment

                • clive heath

                  A303

                  Currently reading Tom Fort's book about the A303, a road I know pretty well as far as its intersection with the Fosse Way going south to Axminster. He made a set of TV programmes on the topic. Visiting my mother near Devizes takes us as far as Stonehenge as long as the queue doesn't extend up Beacon Hill in which case a deviation through Bulford is necessary. The road toward Devizes pictured on the cover as leaving the A303 on the eastern side no longer exists. Last seen with rolls of grass ready for turfing. Tom describes the view from the A 303 on the east side as "magnificent...It does not fail to lift the heart and magnetise the senses". However on Christmas Eve last the sun was in the west:




                  and the "pile of stones" was looking considerably different from the Midsummer sunrise morning when I first visited in company with friends from school, hippie students from Salisbury Art college, soldiers letting off thunderflashes, all united in song "Dere's de light an' I wanna go home". My borrowed bike got a puncture so I had a bit of a walk.


                  What I've learnt from the section on Winterbourne Stoke I'm somewhat ashamed to admit. I had never realised what a water-meadow was and how it worked and what it did. In this part of Wiltshire it maintained a constant source of grass to feed the Sheep variety "Wiltshire Horn" which ".. was regarded primarily as a dung machine..". Read all about it......

                  p.s. by the way (literally and metaphorically) if you turn left going west on the A303 just after crossing the River Test toward Wherwell on the B3058, in spring you will find a lovely Bluebell wood on the right hand side as you also will if you turn left off the A4 going west about a mile and a half after Froxfield. This road goes through the eastern edge of Savernake Forest.
                  Last edited by Guest; 17-01-14, 13:36. Reason: typo and afterthought

                  Comment

                  • verismissimo
                    Full Member
                    • Nov 2010
                    • 2957

                    The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Finally the third part of his walk across Europe in the 1930s. Completed/edited posthumously by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper.
                    Last edited by verismissimo; 26-01-14, 19:29.

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                    • Eine Alpensinfonie
                      Host
                      • Nov 2010
                      • 20570

                      I've just finished J.K.Rowling's A Casual Vacancy on e-book. I was curious to discover what the writer of Harry Potter would do in writing an adult book. My worst fears were confirmed when layers of smut seemed to be the essential ingredient. Yet her ability to write a good story was evident in the end.

                      Comment

                      • Anna

                        Originally posted by Eine Alpensinfonie View Post
                        I've just finished J.K.Rowling's A Casual Vacancy on e-book. I was curious to discover what the writer of Harry Potter would do in writing an adult book. My worst fears were confirmed when layers of smut seemed to be the essential ingredient. Yet her ability to write a good story was evident in the end.
                        I bought that some months ago in a charity shop - thought it was terribly badly written (I've only read one HP book so don't know about them) although the idea was good the execution was dire. I then passed it on to another charity shop ..... Don't know anyone who has read her detective story under the name of Galbraith.

                        Comment

                        • verismissimo
                          Full Member
                          • Nov 2010
                          • 2957

                          Sydney and Violet: Their Life with TS Eliot, Proust, Joyce and the Excruciatingly Irrascible Wyndham Lewis by Stephen Klaidman.

                          It's riveting!

                          Comment

                          • amateur51

                            Originally posted by verismissimo View Post
                            Sydney and Violet: Their Life with TS Eliot, Proust, Joyce and the Excruciatingly Irrascible Wyndham Lewis by Stephen Klaidman.

                            It's riveting!
                            It sounds fascinating, verismissimo - thanks for the recommendation

                            Comment

                            • Thropplenoggin
                              Full Member
                              • Mar 2013
                              • 1587

                              Gustav Mahler by Jens Malte Fischer. A compendious doorstop with 766 pages.
                              It loved to happen. -- Marcus Aurelius

                              Comment

                              • amateur51

                                Originally posted by Thropplenoggin View Post
                                Gustav Mahler by Jens Malte Fischer. A compendious doorstop with 766 pages.
                                Is it worth reading, Throppers?

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