The Godfather: Peter Corris on Viking traces
Many years ago a letter came to me from a firm of solicitors in Cumberland, England. It had originally been addressed to my father, who had died a few years before and was redirected to me as the eldest surviving male relative of my grandfather, Robert Henry Corris....
The Godfather: Peter Corris on The Woman in White – book and film
As I wrote in an earlier column, I read Wilkie Collins’s ‘sensational novels’ in my younger days and admired them as good yarns. More recently I read (when I could still read) Peter Ackroyd’s excellent 2012 biography of Collins. As I’ve also written about...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on the making of audiobooks
Recently I was anxious to hear a reading of Morris West’s 1965 novel The Ambassador. I’d been told it was better than Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1956), which I’d read many years ago and recently heard as an audiobook. I inquired at the Newtown Library and was...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on Patsy Cline
Recently I watched the 1980 film Coal Miner’s Daughter, a biopic about country singer Loretta Lynn. I enjoyed the film, thinking Sissy Spacek deserved her Oscar, and admiring the sprightly performance of Tommy Lee Jones as the singer’s husband and the solid work of...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on the demise of newspapers
My local corner shop has informed me that as a ‘small business’, it will no longer have the Sydney Morning Herald delivered. This, along with the SMH going tabloid and its shrinking size, appears to portend the demise of the daily newspaper. Some experts believe daily...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on The Moonstone
I can’t remember when I first read Wilkie Collins’s ‘sensational’ (to use the contemporary term) novel The Moonstone (1868). It would have been at some time in that ten-year-long period of intensive work as an undergraduate and postgraduate student, when I turned to...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on train songs
Responding to my column about execution songs, an NRB reader made some suggestions and remarked that, for train songs, there were ‘300 and counting’. I’m sure there is a list somewhere on the web but I’m contenting myself with a few that I’ve become aware of over the...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on writers about writers
With notable exceptions – Ian Fleming’s fulsome praise (to his face) of Raymond Chandler in a 1958 BBC broadcast interview, for example – writers are not usually particularly generous to each other. It’s a competitive business with everyone, as it were, fighting for...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on Lady Chatterley’s Lover
I recently listened to a reading of the unabridged version of DH Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Before that, if I’d been asked if I’d read the book I would have answered that I had, but I found this was not so. At most I might have read the bowdlerised...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on his worst pop songs
My familiarity with pop music spans only the 1950s to the 1970s, after which I lost touch. I’m aware that I may be taking this mostly ephemeral material too seriously, but I’ve found it an interesting personal exercise to choose my ten worst pop songs ever and the...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on the things people say
There are things people say that stick with you – that you puzzle over, cherish, laugh at or adopt as your own for certain situations. I offer a few that have come my way. My mother, who was not given to philosophical pronouncements, once said of some behaviour...
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