After Christmas dinner and all the festive fun, one of my favourite things about this time of year is the influx of roundup posts and top pick lists that flood the internet. As always, my favourites are mostly films, TV shows, books and productions that were released or opened during the year, however some were things I finally managed to catch up on in 2017. Thank you, Netflix.
Sunday, 31 December 2017
Thursday, 16 November 2017
A Year in Music: 5 Album Picks
This year, my blog has been quite low on music
content, not by any conscious decision. It’s been a busy one, and in the same
way that I haven’t had the time to write as many blog posts as I would like, I
haven’t spent as much time discovering new music. But that’s not to say that
music hasn’t been a big part of my year; I listen to hours of music on a daily
basis.
Wednesday, 1 November 2017
Of Kith and Kin – Bush Theatre
There’s a lot crammed into Of Kith and Kin's 100 minutes. Chris Thompson covers issues of friendship, family and
relationships, of legality and ethics, and of sexuality, masculinity and
domestic abuse, packaged into three distinct acts.
Sunday, 17 September 2017
Five Guys Named Moe – Marble Arch Theatre
Five Guys Named Moe is a 1990 musical based on the music of Louis Jordan, a musician and songwriter often crowned the king of jazz, who had a huge influence on music genres such as Rhythm & Blues and Rock & Roll.
Wednesday, 6 September 2017
Review: Wildest of All - P. K. Lynch
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n.b. This image contains a proof copy, not the final cover of the book |
Any book that begins with a death is likely to follow with dark and turbulent chapters, and P. K. Lynch certainly doesn’t shy away from this in Wildest of All. The novel isn’t just about the impact of a death on the family, but the way in which a family falls apart when the one person that tied it all together is gone.
Thursday, 24 August 2017
Review: Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour - Duke of York's Theatre
Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour
is one of those plays that’s everything you hoped for and more. The Olivier
award-winner is based on the novel The Sopranos by Alan Warner and follows six
girls from a Catholic school in remote town in Scotland as they venture to
Edinburgh for a choir competition.
Sunday, 20 August 2017
Review: Ideal Love – Alice Burnett
Initially, I wasn't going to read and review Ideal Love. Quite literally judging the book by its cover (okay, title), I thought it
was the kind of book I would usually avoid, wrongfully assuming it might be a
bit chick lit. But the mystery in the blurb drew me in, and I decided to go for
it.
Sunday, 23 July 2017
New Zealand: 24 Hours in Auckland
It's not often that your boyfriend temporarily moves to the other side of the world for pilot school, so as soon as he had settled in we began planning my trip over to New Zealand to visit.
Sunday, 9 July 2017
Review: The Mentor – Vaudeville Theatre
Written by
renowned German novelist Daniel Kehlmann and translated into English by
Christopher Hampton, The Mentor pens the interaction between two playwrights,
one considered a literary legend and the other just beginning his career.
Saturday, 8 July 2017
5 Reasons to Read Literary Classics
The wonderful Legend Press, who you may have noticed I work with a lot on my blog, have just released a new range of classic titles, and it's got me thinking about why we should still be reading the classics.
Sunday, 2 July 2017
Review: Hir – Bush Theatre
After serving three years in the Marines, Isaac (Arthur Darvill) returns home to his small town in Central
Valley, America to find out that things aren’t exactly how he left them. Isaac’s
father (Andy Williams), having suffered a stroke, can no longer string a
sentence together and is forced into the daily attire of a dress and clownish face paint by
Isaac’s mother, Paige (Ashley McGuire). Under the same umbrella of humiliation, Paige regularly sprays him with water as a punishment for bad behaviour, or years of patriarchal domestic
abuse.
Tuesday, 20 June 2017
Review: An American in Paris - Dominion Theatre
An American
in Paris, inspired by the 1951 Academy Award winning film, has been on my list
since it arrived in the West End, following its critically-acclaimed run on Broadway.
Having never seen the film, it wasn't the adaptation as such that intrigued me,
but the fact that the Tony Award winning new musical incorporates the music of
George and Ira Gershwin.
Sunday, 4 June 2017
Review: Me, Myself and Them – Dan Mooney
Denis Murphy is living with
monsters. And we are introduced to these monsters from the opening sentence of
the novel, as the four watch him eating his smoked salmon and brown bread.
These aren’t just demons in Denis’ head, or skeletons in his closet, or
monsters under the bed, these are four very real creatures manifested in quite
disturbing forms. A gruesome clown, a rotting professor, a nondescript hairy
being and a woman that is also a cat.
Monday, 24 April 2017
Review: Blame – Paul Read
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Although Paul Read’s Blame exists in a few
narrative spaces, spanning various points in protagonist Lucas’s life,
ultimately they all lead to one common denominator: Lucas’s relationship with
his father.
Friday, 21 April 2017
Poetry Journal I – Beginnings
I've touched on my thoughts on poetry before, in a post outlining my goals for this year and during my review of Rupi Kaur’s Milk & Honey, but for the sake of detailing my Poetry Journal
process so far, it makes sense to start from the beginning again.
Wednesday, 12 April 2017
Review: The Magician’s Lie – Greer Macallister
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In ‘A Conversation with the Author’ at the end
of The Magician’s Lie, Greer Macallister suggests that ‘writers are
illusionists who work in words’, a ‘kind of magician’. Though illusion forms the premise of the Macallister’s plot, it is her aptitude for truly enchanting
storytelling that carries the real magic of this book.
Monday, 6 March 2017
Review: Milk and Honey - Rupi Kaur
I had seen bits of Rupi Kaur’s poetry floating around the internet for a while but hadn’t paid much attention until I saw a few people reference her book, Milk and Honey, and it went straight onto my to-read list.
Wednesday, 1 March 2017
Review: The Song of the Stork - Stephan Collishaw
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n.b. This image contains a proof copy, not the final cover of the book. |
The Song of the Stork is a beautifully written
and poignant novel about a young girl in Poland during the Second World War. Yael,
a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, has been separated from her family and is fighting
for survival when she comes across the farm of the village outcast and takes
refuge in his house. The novel is split between the period she hides with
Aleksei, who is unable to speak, and the gentle relationship that ensues, and
the time she spends with a Jewish partisan group fighting in the woods.
Monday, 27 February 2017
5 TV Shows I Will Forever Rewatch

Some of my favourite blog posts to write have been 5 Books I Would Read Again and Again and 5 Albums that Never Get Old. I'm one of
those people who finds questions about what my absolute favourite books, albums
and films are very stressful, but I love reflecting on and shouting about those
that I do love.
Friday, 24 February 2017
Four Days in New York
If you follow me on Instagram then you will be well aware that I went to New York a month or so
ago. Congrats for sticking with me if you're still following after weeks of
incessant NYC photos. Apparently I don't have much else going on at the
moment...
Tuesday, 14 February 2017
Review: A Series of Unfortunate Events – Netflix
The original book series by Daniel Handler
(under the elusive pen name Lemony Snicket) was a big part of my childhood. So
much so that the series made it into a post I wrote about books I would read again and again. I couldn’t say how many times I read the series over the
years, but second perhaps only to Harry Potter, it was one of my most esteemed
sets of books.
Thursday, 9 February 2017
Quiet Power
Although this is in part a review of Susan
Cain’s book Quiet Power, I’m not titling or structuring it as I would with a usual
book review, since I am taking a much more reflective and personal approach
(hitting another of my 2017 goals one month into the year – go me).
Sunday, 5 February 2017
Review: Waitress – Brooks Atkinson Theatre (Broadway)
As with any
avid theatregoer, my first thought when planning a trip to New York was ‘what
will we see on Broadway?’, and since Hamilton was out of the question at $800+
dollars per resale ticket, Tony-nominated Waitress was top of the list.
Tuesday, 31 January 2017
Review: La La Land
The hype surrounding La La Land has been
unavoidable. From the inundation of five star reviews to the extraordinarily
positive recommendations from peers and public figures alike, it’s almost
impossible to sit down for this film with an open mind and no expectations.
Wednesday, 18 January 2017
Sunday, 15 January 2017
A New Year: Reflections & Goals
I’ve never been one to set New Year’s
Resolutions but, like most other humans, I welcome markers in time as a
chance to refresh my mindset or kick myself into gear, whether it’s
simply a new day, week, month or, in this case, year.
So, though I won’t be setting myself any
personal resolutions or taking on any major lifestyle changes, there are various
things I want to achieve, projects I want to start and places I want to go
before the end of 2017, and setting these out in writing somehow makes them feel more feasible and less overwhelming.
Thursday, 12 January 2017
Review: Dreamgirls - Savoy Theatre
Dreamgirls is a show I’ve
wanted to see on stage since discovering the infectious music through the 2006 film adaptation, so when I found out it was coming to the West End for
the first time since its Broadway debut in 1981, it went straight to the top of
my list.
Monday, 2 January 2017
2016 Favourites
I started collecting my 2016 favourites back in
January. Every time an album, book, TV show or something on stage has excited
or inspired me over the past year, it’s been added to a list I’ve been keeping
in the mess that is my iPhone notes. And I can now confirm, it hasn’t made the
task of choosing my absolute favourites any easier.
As much as the over-organised side of me would
love this collection things to consist only of TV, books and music that have
been released during 2016, my consumption habits were not willing to cooperate.
So, while most of the below were in fact 2016 babies, expect a few older
competitors to have snuck their way onto the list.
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