by NRB | 25 Mar 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I’ve been commissioned to work on the autobiographies and memoirs of notable people six times. Five of these projects were completed with the books being published and one was aborted. Here are some notes on these exercises. I’ve written several times about working...
by NRB | 18 Mar 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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....
by NRB | 11 Mar 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 4 Mar 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 26 Feb 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 19 Feb 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 12 Feb 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 5 Feb 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 29 Jan 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 22 Jan 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 15 Jan 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
by NRB | 8 Jan 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
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...
JUNE WRIGHT Mother Paul series. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm6 December 2024June Wright has faded from view, but in 1948 her novel Murder in the Telephone [ … ]
ANDREW O’HAGAN Caledonian Road. Reviewed by Catherine Pardey5 December 2024This new novel from the author of Mayflies is set in London, but Glasgow is [ … ]
IAIN RYAN The Dream. Reviewed by Ben Ford Smith3 December 2024Iain Ryan’s latest novel continues his fascination with 1980s Queensland and [ … ]
MARINA YUSZCZUK Thirst. Reviewed by Ann Skea28 November 2024Argentinian writer Marina Yuszczuk puts her twist on the vampire novel in [ … ]