I’m always delighted to come across a Christie mystery I’ve never read before. This Poirot and Hastings adventure, dedicated to Dame Agatha’s beloved dog Peter, is held back from the true vintage status by some glaring plot weaknesses, but still had enough ingenuity and light humour to keep me happy from page to page.
An emotional rollercoaster of a novel about the catastrophic consequences of well-intended pity, this was a somewhat exhausting read but a rich and gripping one too.
Good things come to those who wait! I got tickets for this Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert all the way back in October last year, and experiencing Beethoven’s epic final symphony live was truly worth the wait.
Despite my usual cynicism about sequels and nostalgia, I thoroughly enjoyed this exhilarating and refreshingly old-fashioned blockbuster that improves on the original and, despite all odds, doesn’t feel like a shameless cash grab.
A lesser-known Hitchcock movie about survivors of a German U-boat attack during World War II, this tense survival thriller, set almost entirely aboard a tiny lifeboat, definitely deserves more love and attention.
I was already plenty pumped to hear the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra play John Williams’ greatest hits, but this special celebration of the 90th birthday of the film score maestro turned out to be even more magical.
How do nations cope with crisis and change? In this brilliant book, the author, historian and geographer Jared Diamond examines how six modern countries have dealt with a crisis, and looks at the crises currently unfolding in contemporary Japan, his home country the USA, and the world at large.Read more →
By today’s desensitised standards, this horror classic – often cited as the Scariest Movie of All Time – is kinda dated, kinda slow and not that terribly scary. But its most notorious scenes and moments still have a power to disturb.