Morning Sun - 1952 https://botfrens.com/collections/173/contents/3103522

'Between herself and this middle-aged, baldish little man she could see no similarity; and more significant than all this was the fact that she hated him. Yes, hated him, hated him!' #BookSky 💙📚 #CeliaDale jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/05/19/o...

New on the blog today, my thoughts on OTHER PEOPLE by Celia Dale, in which a teenager's life is upended when her father returns from Australia after a mysterious 12-year absence. An unsettling coming-of-age novel from one of the queens of suburban noir! 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/05/19/o...

Police Raid was produced by DEFA in 1947. The state-controlled film studio of the Soviet occupation zone (which would later become East Germany). This film is more a crime procedural than reckoning with the war than the other "rubble" films I have seen.

Eugène Jansson's painting from 1898 depicts the large expanse of water in central Stockholm known Riddarfjäden. Jansson was one of the most significant artists in the last years of the 19thC to create a style of painting that reflected the essence of Scandinavia.

'Le Mal n'existe pas', Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

Augustus John's 1930 portrait is of Caitlin Macnamara some six years before she first met Dylan Thomas at The Wheatsheaf in Bloomsbury. Caitlin was sat on a stool at the bar when Thomas staggered towards her, laid his head in her lap, and mumbled a proposal of marriage.

Very excited for this new Jia Zhangke. CAUGHT BY THE TIDES was wonderful! #FilmSky

The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, coming next month, edited by Rabih Alameddine and John Freeman, inc stories from Ted Chiang, Can Xue, Scholastique Mukasonga and dozens more. Delighted that Alameddine has heroically included one of his own stories.

And what an extraordinary film. The final juxtaposition of tennis with the lighter in the gutter, the final convergence at the fairground, the thudding hooves of the carousel.

First watch: Dodsworth (1936). Following The Heiress, another William Wyler for me and once again an adaptation of play derived from a novel. Walter Huston and Ruth Chatterton are the titular Dodsworths, a wealthy mid-Western couple whose marriage falls apart during an extended trip to Europe. 1/4

You have this notion that you’re different, he says then, that you’re somehow special. He looks me in the eye. You’re not special, Anna. You’re average, and ordinary, like everyone else. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll stop dreaming and grow up. jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/a...

'Waiting at the Bus Stop.' (c1953) Ronald Ossory Dunlop relished the work of dozens of his peers and predecessors. He admired Oscar Kokoschka; the brilliant colour and emotional energy of Matthew Smith and the quiet tones of Lawrence Gowing. Quite an amalgam.

This week's theme is 'People of London' - a celebration of ALL the people who make and have made London the beautiful city it is. ------ 'The London Underground' (from 'This Is London', 1959) by Miroslav Šašek

Picked as the classic #FilmOfTheWeek in Total TV Guide #HumphreyBogart #GloriaGrahame IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) 8am drama #TPTVsubtitles

These are haunting and quite beautiful. Completely new artist for me and I can't wait to learn more about him.

Breakfast with Bogart tomorrow morning as Talking Pictures will be serving IN A LONELY PLACE at 8am. #FilmSky

Next Saturday, the great Irish Cubist Mary Swanzy is being honoured in Dublin. A plague will placed on the house she was born in at 23 Merrion Square. L: The White Tower, c.1926 R: Cubist Landscape with Red Pagoda and Bridge, 1925-1930

'Apples.' (c1919) Matthew Smith was a superb colourist whose work owed much both to the Fauve tradition, his paintings possess a muscular vigour and directness quite alien to the predominant styles of painting in Britain at the time and are still remarkable for their immediacy.

In competition at #Cannes, Pawel Pawlikowski’s FATHERLAND, reviewed here by Peter Bradshaw. One for Thomas Mann fans. #FilmSky #BookSky 💙📚 www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ma...

Just finished reading this together with my son (10), taking turns. He responded to it really well, and honestly I'd forgotten where it goes. What a strange, beautiful story. Gives me deep nostalgia for the English countryside of my childhood!* 📚💙 #booksky

You have this notion that you’re different, he says then, that you’re somehow special. He looks me in the eye. You’re not special, Anna. You’re average, and ordinary, like everyone else. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll stop dreaming and grow up. jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/a...

Second look at the HURVIN ANDERSON exhibition at Tate Britain. So many ghostly images here. Loss, solitude, marginalisation and displacement…all relevant themes. #Art #ArtSky

First watch: joining the chorus of praise for this 1949 gothic-tinged melodrama, an adaptation of a play based on Henry James' Washington Square. Olivia de Havilland plays a naive young woman who stands to inherit a fortune, but is thought by her own father to lack the charm to attract suitors. 1/5

'It’s not healthy – this has become his mantra lately. You’ve been too sheltered always, he told me during a row last week, too mollycoddled all your life. It’s the reason you’re so gullible. You’ve never known hardship…' #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/a...

If I have a tiny superpower, it's knowing that films are films and books are books, which is probably why I loved THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (1969) so much. #FilmSky #Letterboxd letterboxd.com/danielmudfor...

First watch: THERE WAS A FATHER (Japanese, 1942) is a quietly moving film by Yasujirõ Ozu that sneaked up on me with an emotionally powerful ending. It’s a father-and-son story that explores painful separation after the father—perfectly played by Chishū Ryū— #FilmSky #MovieSky 1/2

MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT THE AGE OF INNOCENCE CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING #BookSky

Well, this is excellent news. Lonergan’s MARGARET is an all-timer for me. #FilmSky

'And this is how it goes, this oscillating life. There is seldom a week when I do not experience some lurch, some punch of rejection, followed, a few days later, by a surge of elation. I am never free of him – he has taken over my mind.' #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/a...

A more useful poll would be of the same people's choices for the 10 most under-rated novels. Worth remembering that Barbara Pym's moribund career was revived when she was mentioned in a feature like that in the 70s. It'd be nice to see great books which most people aren't aware of getting a leg up.

'Les Contes de la lune vague après la pluie', 1953 Chef-d'œuvre absolu Kenji Mizoguchi (16 mai 1898 - 24 août 1956) 💖🌟👑🎥

#top5irishnovels At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O’Brien) The Land of Lost Things (John Connolly) The Visitor (Maeve Brennan) King Goshawk and the Birds (Eimar O’Duffy) A Ghost in the Throat (Doireann Ní Ghríofa) - not strictly a novel but not entirely non-fiction either so…

The full list of @theguardian.com’s Top 100 Novels of all Time is online. Here are my choices (chosen on a deadline, it changes constantly and I forgot Edna O’Brien). www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

The Golden Baby, created by Brenda Marshall c.1950s, in the art therapy studio at Netherne hospital where she was compelled to live. Another work from a series that art therapist Edward Adamson titled Nurse & Father, in which Brenda explored her traumatic family history & the distress it caused her

My top 5 Irish novels AMONGST WOMEN by John McGahern THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE by Brian Moore MOLLY FOX’S BIRTHDAY by Deirdre Madden THE SPRINGS OF AFFECTION by Maeve Brennan (if linked short stories are allowed) THE CHILDREN OF DYNMOUTH by William Trevor (not set in Ireland) #BookSky

I think the best way to enjoy this list, which contains lots of predictable choices (made as it was by committee), is to find a book you like, click to see who voted for it, and then look at the voters' other top 10 choices. You might find something else you like that you haven't read.

First watch: Afire (2023). My fourth Christian Petzold and easily the most accessible, benefitting from some comic levity I hadn't yet found in his work. Leon (Thomas Schubert) is a self-absorbed author whose plans for a writing retreat at a friend's mother's holiday home go disastrously wrong. 1/3

From the archive for H. E. Bates, #BornOnThisDay in 1905, my thoughts on FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR FRANCE, a brilliant novel about love, loss, trust & uncertainty, set in midst of #WW2. I adore this beautiful book, a poignant, gripping gem! #BookSky #BOTD 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/f...

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER (Jim Jarmusch, 2025). I loved this. A beautifully observed wryly comic triptych of family reunions, each involving a pair of siblings. Questions of how well we can ever know our parents ripple through this film, the success of which rests on >> (1/2) #FilmSky

This is one of the loveliest creatures I've ever seen. Like a fairy.

Five A.M. - 1937 https://botfrens.com/collections/173/contents/3103968

#LastFourWatched #FilmSky

Why sleep when you can arrange all the books you’ve ever published on the kitchen dresser? I can’t wait for tomorrow - celebrating our new Helene Hanff title at @foylesforbooks.bsky.social and also welcoming 20 guests to hear about the Manderley Press story over afternoon tea #booksky

Trying to choose birthday boy James Mason’s finest performance is a mug’s game because he was never bad and always magnetic – utterly convincing playing good or evil. Unforgettable in Odd Man Out and shockingly truthful in Garland’s A Star is Born, but my fave is his neglected The Reckless Moment.

Henry Lamb's portrait of Evelyn Waugh takes us back to 1928. It was the year Waugh published 'Rossetti,' wrote and published 'Decline and Fall,' and married Evelyn Gardner, setting up house together at 17a Canonbury Square, Islington in London.

Today on the blog, the outbreak of war - Novella a Day in May 2026 - No.15 madamebibilophilerecommends.co.uk/2026/05/15/n...

2026 reading 🧵 Kurkov’s Kyiv mysteries turn away from the comforts of crime in volume 2, becoming something much more unsettling. Is the crime being investigated even a crime? Have the guilty done anything wrong? Under Soviet rule little is certain. I liked the first but this takes it up a notch.

Read: Vincenzo Latronico: La Perfezioni (2022, beautifully translated by Sophie Hughes). Well, I loved this as much as everybody else. What a jewel of a book. I guffawed throughout at these silly characters (and my silly self). A real portrait of our times.

We’re appointing a writer-in-residence! Join us to respond to our holdings related to the Bloomsbury Group (including the archives of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press) ahead of a major exhibition in 2027. Applications close 19 May. Best of luck! collections.reading.ac.uk/news-and-vie...