11. I’m continuing to read Plautus to think about Shakespeare’s comedy (and especially the presence of violence hanging over it), but when you read stuff this wonderful you just wish you could read Latin and immerse yourself in the Classics forever.
10. Absolutely utterly wonderful in so many ways - especially the scenes involving Titania and Bottom - but it never quite reaches the joyous democratic radicalism of Shakespeare’s best comedies and retains a kind of patronising class prejudice…
9. Glorious translations rendered in a kind of freewheeling, verbally dazzling, New York Jewish style which you get a strong feeling accords very well with Plautus’s style… I was reading this thinking about writing some on Shakespeare, farce, and bodily punishment…
It’s marvellous!
8. I don’t think I’d read this since I was a teenager, when I remember finding it emotionally devastating. This time it was funnier and I admired his stylistic verve - the overdetermined stylistic tics. I could see it much more clearly as a work of postmodernism too-economically as well as in style
7. Continuing my pretty intense, exciting read of the Shakespeare comedies. This one is weird and disturbing for all the obvious reasons, but the writing of the minor “low” characters is incredibly beautiful and democratic
6. More Shakespeare - not only very funny but strange and puzzling in its treatment of time, capital punishment and the atmosphere of the dream
5. I loved the glorious last chapter which discovers and articulates post-structuralism in 1962…negation as a power of affirmation which always differs creatively with itself
4. On the one hand, a convincing diagnosis of our circulation driven culture, and the critique of contemporary video aesthetics is excellent. On the other, this is parochial, conservative, humourless, and reproduces much of the immediacy it critiques in the literalism of some of its interpretations.
1. Hamnet (2025), dir. Chloé Zhao
All the films I’ve watched in 2026:
3. I have the luxury of reading a lot of Shakespeare just now - in many ways I find this one a little too mannered but it has its moments including a truly remarkable ending
2. Forgot to upload this one a week or so back…
I'm really thrilled to share my new article, 'Deleuze's Dickens: Life and Community', on Deleuze's late reading of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and published in the new Dickens Quarterly. (I've got a PDF if anyone wants it!) doi.org/10.1353/dqt....
I'm really thrilled to share my new article, 'Deleuze's Dickens: Life and Community', on Deleuze's late reading of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and published in the new Dickens Quarterly. (I've got a PDF if anyone wants it!) doi.org/10.1353/dqt....
1. A final volume of ghostly stories for Christmas. This one was great - I’m a total sucker for sea stories in general and this had some very strange and exciting moments
Everything I’ve read in 2026:
41. Squeezing one last book into 2025 - another ghost story anthology. This one has its moments, has a couple of of wonderful settings, and wears its excellent influences proudly on its sleeve, but most of the stories don’t manage to achieve what they hope to - unfortunately!
40. I really love reading ghost stories at Christmas. I really enjoyed some of these though it’s not the strongest Tales of the Weird anthology. There’s a good one about a house which is just black nothingness inside
39. Extremely radio 4 and quietly conservative but also pretty good especially in challenging the idea that folklore represents national traditions and problematising its putatively ancient origins
38. Is this the most underrated Shakespeare play?
97. Death in Venice (1971), dir. Luchino Visconti
96. In Search of Tadzio (1970), dir. Luchino Visconti
95. One Hour with You (1932), dir. Ernst Lubitsch
I’d normally be opposed to the British government trying to interfere in former colonies but, given the UK believes the Sino-British Joint Declaration is still a legally binding treaty, its failure to attempt to enforce its basic provisions is grotesque www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...
94. The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), dir. Ernst Lubitsch
93. Where Is The Friend’s House? (1987), dir. Abbas Kiarostami
37. Fine and excellent on Goya but actually, apart from a few moments, I found it surprisingly anodyne and platitudinous….
36. Triumphantly good - imagine being able to write like the Brontë sisters!
