While many people will be familiar with the story of Sophie and Wizard Howl thanks to Mayazaki’s anime blockbuster, Howl’s Moving Castle is the fantastical masterpiece of Diana Wynne Jones, celebrated adult and children’s author. I was vaguely familiar with the plotline, however I wasn’t prepared for the beauty of the story and the strong
Lewis Carroll’s extraordinary vivid dream world of Alice In Wonderland is as old as the day is long – it’s a story that has been told over and over again, and honestly it never loses its appeal. As a child I don’t remember when I first discovered it, it seemed to have always been there,
The phrase ‘careful what you wish for’ gets kicked around a lot these days, without much thought for it actually means. It just something we say to people who’re behaving obnoxiously and irresponsibly, but for me the phrase has a much deeper moral meaning. One that says: the fault is in the want, the desire.
Philip K Dick is in my opinion and many others the master of science fiction. His works seems to drip off the tongue when one mentions said genre, such works as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Time Out of Joint, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly – the list
For the majority of movie fans, Jaws is a total classic, though the same cannot be said for its sequel (and let’s not even get into the other two). For me, Jaws 2 is half of a really interesting film. Before it settles into a maritime take on the slasher movie, with teens devoured by
Of all of the countless storytelling styles, there is something refreshingly outrageous about the comic book -or graphic novel- medium. It’s something hard to put your thumb on, but present nonetheless. The smug knowledge that a comic is an unashamedly un-real thing. There’s none of the cloying self-importance that often hangs off a novel: laden
The circus is something that has been drawing people to it since 1782 when the first recorded circus performed at the Amphithéâtre Anglois in Paris. People seem to be drawn to the circus like puss from a boil, ensnared within its tendril like fingers that creep and crawl through neighbourhoods, latching on and enticing people
The Folio Society really do make beautiful books. From the binding to the paper choice, in the subtleties of the typeset and margins, to the artwork that they use to augment the stories. If they publish a favourite of yours then they are the place to go when you want to keep that book for
What is interesting about literature written in the past is the omnipotent manner with which one, from our saggy hi-tech sofas in the future, can now read it: the time capsule quality of it. A quality so much more heightened when reading someone’s version of the future as written in the past, often wildly off
Illustration © Charles van Sandwyk 2018 from The Folio Society edition of Charles van Sandwyk’s How To See Fairies The Folio Society edition of How To See Fairies is a very special book indeed – it is so magical that one can’t help but be drawn into the world that Charles van Sandwyk has deftly and
