Subject to change at the drop of a hat
Currently reading: James Dashner’s Mortality Doctrine trilogy
Recently read: Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Call
Most recent re-reading: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and EM Forster's Collected Short Stories
Recent memorable reading: Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed, Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End, Patrick Gale’s A Place Called Winter, Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time
Looking forward to reading: Jo Baker’s The Picture Book, Tracy Chevalier's New Boy, Noah Hawley’s Before the Fall, Tove Janson’s The Summer Book, Alan Johnson's autobiography This Boy, Kirsty Logan’s The Gracekeepers, Andrew Miller's Pure, Ross Raisin’s A Natural
Some recent memorable theatre: (Bolton Octagon’s) Tenant of Wildfell Hall, (Billy Pearce in Bradford Alhambra's) Cinderella, (Bristol Old Vic/Sally Cookson’s) Jane Eyre, (Glenda Jackson in Deborah Warner’s) King Lear, (Ballet Rambert's) Ghost Dances, (and at the RSC:) Imperium I & II, Salome, Titus Andronicus and Venus and Adonis
Looking forward to watching at theatre: Duchess of Malfi, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Macbeth, Merry Wives of Windsor, Mrs Rich, Romeo and Juliet
Some recent cinema I appreciated: (NT Live) Angels in America, The Big Sick, Blade Runner 2049, Christine, DeniaI, Doctor Strange, The Eagle Huntress, God’s Own Country, Hacksaw Ridge, Hidden Figures, I Daniel Blake, LA LA Land, Lion, Loving Vincent, Manchester-by-the-sea, Moana, Paddington 2, Rogue One, Silence, Sully, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Wonder Woman
Some recent TV to talk about: Black Sails, Britain’s (and The World's) Greatest Bridges, Broken, Class, The Crown, The Flash, First Dates, Game of Thrones, The Gifted, The Good Wife, The Handmaid’s Tale, Little Boy Blue, Little Women, Mindhunter, The Musketeers, The Sinner, Thirteen, Trapped, Victoria, To Walk Invisible
Authors whose work I have consistently enjoyed reading (and re-reading):
Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Angela Carter, John Christopher, Charles Dickens, Dave Duncan, EM Forster, Alan Garner, William Golding, Sally Green, Thomas Hardy, Alice Hoffmann, Kazuo Ishiguro, DH Lawrence, Kerry Madden, Somerset Maugham, Anne McCaffrey, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, RL Stevenson, Meera Syal, Colm Tóibín, Anne Tyler, Evelyn Waugh, HG Wells, TH White
Ten theatre productions that stick in my mind:
Adrian Noble’s As You Like It with Juliet Stephenson, Melly Still’s NT Coram Boy, Adrian Noble’s Doctor Faustus with Ben Kingsley, Matthew Warchus’s WYP Fiddler on the Roof, Michael Bogdanov’s ESC Shakespeare’s History Cycle, Michael Boyd’s Shakespeare’s History Cycle, Laurie Sansom’s/Rona Munro's The James Plays, RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby, Matthew Warchus’s WYP The Plough and the Stars, Nicholas Hytner’s RSC The Tempest
Dramatists I would always book tickets for:
Caryl Churchill, Helen Edmondson, John Fletcher, Henrik Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer, William Shakespeare, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams
Poets I re-read (aloud if in a “safe space”):
Maya Angelou, Simon Armitage, WH Auden, William Blake, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Chaucer, John Clare, Gillian Clarke, Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Donne, Carol Ann Duffy, TS Eliot, Seamus Heaney, George Herbert, Ted Hughes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, Philip Larkin, Louis Macneice, Milton, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Pope, Peter Porter, Isaac Rosenberg, Rossetti, Tennyson, Wordsworth, WB Yeats
Top Ten Films (top of my head currently):
The Big Chill, Cabaret, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather I&II, God's Own Country, Hannah and her Sisters, Lawrence of Arabia, Remains of the Day, Shakespeare In Love, Singin' in the Rain
