Having written four books set in the East End of London in the 1880s I like to think I know a trope when I see one, and Year of the Rabbit has them in spades. In fact, they come so thick and fast in the first episode of Channel 4’s new crime comedy it’s as […]
Review: D-Day: The Last Heroes
Best-selling author AL Berridge reviews D-Day: The Last Heroes, shown on BBC One on Saturday, 8 June, 2019
Review: The Favourite
If the release of a new period drama isn’t accompanied by a debate about its historical accuracy, is it even a period drama?
The bones of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite are entirely factual – Queen Anne really did have a female ‘favourite’, Sarah Churchill, Lady Marlborough
Review: Les Miserables
Everything about Les Miserables is built on an epic scale. At around 1500 pages, depending on which edition is making your bookshelf sag, Victor Hugo’s novel (published in 1862) is not only physically enormous, but also it deals with MASSIVE themes: love, obsession, redemption, justice, fate and the nature of good and evil. It’s human […]
Review: The Long Song
The Long Song, (BBC1, 9pm) is an adaptation of Andrea Levy’s Man Booker shortlisted novel and tells the story of July, a slave growing up on a Jamaican plantation in the dying days of slavery. The first episode takes place against the backdrop of the ‘Baptist War’, or ‘Christmas Rebellion’, a slave revolt that increased […]
Review: Death and Nightingales
Locals will tell you that for six months of the year the lakes are in Fermanagh, and for the other six, Fermanagh is in the lakes. Rain sweeps in quickly in this small corner of Ulster. Waters rise and landscapes change. Frontiers are always on the move and borders once thought traversable can suddenly become […]
Review: They Shall Not Grow Old
At first it seems a strange title. “They shall grow not old” is from Laurence Binyon’s epitaph on The Fallen of World War I, but the emphasis in Peter Jackson’s masterly film is firmly on those who survived it: the men who enlisted and went out to France, but lived and came home to tell […]
Review: Outlaw King
Netflix’s latest foray into original drama shines a spotlight on three crucial years (1304-1307) in the life of Robert the Bruce, the king who would eventually win independence for Scotland at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. We first meet Bruce two years before his 1306 coronation as he surrenders to King Edward I at […]