Meryl Streep clearly had enormous fun playing Florence Foster Jenkins, the heiress who was the world's worst opera singer and I'm convinced that she must have studied at the feet of Hyacinth Bucket ... her operatic soirées are so like dear Hyacinth's candlelight suppers. The scriptwriter (best known for Midsomer Murders and episodes of The Bill) appeared at the end and claimed that if not precisely factually correct, the story has 'truthiness' ... what a horrible word! It was good fun (though I think I might have edited out the jarring details about Florence's syphilis, even in the interests of 'truthiness').
Incidentally, all those wonderful shots of New York ... they're all filmed in Liverpool.
But I still preferred Marguerite, the recent French take on the same story - played with a far lighter touch, it brought out the poignancy of the story rather more subtly. Did anyone see see Maureen Lipman playing the same role in the stageplay?  I don't even recall it being on but I can so imagine her doing it.

I stole a couple of hours out of a work trip to Oxford last week to stroll through the water meadows at Magdalen, carpeted with thousands of snake's head fritillaries - a truly memorable sight,  as I've never been there at the right time of year before. There were primroses, violets and deer - a porter told me that he'd seen a couple of otters - and you wouldn't think that you were in the middle of a city (well, except for the hum of traffic). It was a gorgeous sunny day and I spotted what were surely the first rather self-conscious straw boaters of the season punting on the river.

Dull, plodding, over-long - and proof that all the right ingredients (London and Oxford, 1945) don't necessarily add up to a good read. Was hoping this would be an undemanding but enjoyable read for the weekend but it's writing-by-numbers. After I'd begun, I remembered that I was none too keen on the same author's Half of the Human Race; but this new one is worse. Now filed under 'life's too short' and it will probably go back to the library unfinished.

I thought Outlander got off to a slow start last week and my heart sank, but now they're in Paris with Bonnie Prince Charlie - what a drip, Flora McDonald can have him and welcome - it's back on top form and the costumes are FABULOUS. So that's my Sunday evenings rescued. I was fascinated to discover that Claire's 18th century costumes reference the New Look ...  I think I'd picked up on it anyway but now I'm deconstructing every gown. How clever. It's a subtle way of making her stand out as an outsider. I couldn't be bothered watching this chat show all the way through - what an irritating interviewer -but if you go to 23.00 it's worth listening to the costume designer.

As so often happens, brilliant Matt has made me laugh out loud ...  I can't help feeling that if British newspapers were allowed to tell us what most of us know already, they wouldn't have had anything like as much fun with the story. I'm not convinced about the public's right to know, but I'll defend to the hilt the public's right to take the ...  (Okay, I'll be polite and say take the mickey.)

I"d never heard of Elizabeth Harrower until recently I came across something online that made me think, 'I have to read this book!' A long-neglected Australian writer, she sounded like someone who might have been rediscovered by Persephone Books. A flip through the introduction only confirmed that: 'She is acutely observant of the mores of London in the late 1950s, of tearooms and restaurants and trips to the theatre; and, as ever, of the intersection of class and power.'  
If only I could remember the website where I read the original review ... because over the last few days, I keep thinking, Why on earth am I persevering with this! It is sapping - draining - life-destroying. And 80% of me is bored and the other 20% is thinking what a very clever writer Harrower is. (She is now 88, but gave up writing in the 1970s, )
At first, I was reminded of the L-Shaped Room ... Clem is a young law student, studying by correspondence course, giving French lessons in the evenings and living in a chilly attic bedsit. She is an outsider. 'At home the single aim was to present a front of expensive elegance, whereas in London it was obligatory to show what one was and did: this uniform reserved for genuine socialists, this for hereditary shoppers in Harrods, and so on ...'
Clem is competent, focused, independent - until her landlady takes on a troubled but charismatic young man as a window-cleaner/caretaker. Christian is a failed actor, feckless, dishonest, unreliable, alcoholic, embroiled in an appalling co-dependent relationship of jealousy and neediness with frumpy, uneducated, working-class Olive. One of his pie in the sky fantasies is a job in Paris, so Clem agrees to give him French lessons ... and is drawn into the chaos of his life. He is a leech. Clem wants to save him. He is un-saveable. Not worth saving.
And as a reader, you're bored - exasperated - thoroughly fed up with this unpleasant character's company ... and yet I've kept on reading. Which is why I think Harrower is so clever, she has let Christian make some kind of claim on me as a reader, just as he makes claims on Clem.
I'm now 50 pages from the end. I don't know how it will end. There could be violence - murder - she could destroy her life and marry him - she could get a grip and walk away ... I don't really care because she has exhausted my patience. I feel a bit besmirched as if I've spent too long in bad company and want to shrug off their tentacles.
And yet I carry on reading. Without pleasure - or much interest - yet unable to find the willpower to call it a day. I can't remember ever feeling so manipulated by an author. I've been consoling myself, thinking, Well, I'll finish this, but I'm never reading another ... then found this review of The Watch Tower ...  'This novel gripped me like a nightmare.' 'One of Australian literature's most malicious villains.'
And part of me is saying, Don't even think about it. And yet I know I'm going straight from here to the library catalogue ... The battered reader, like a battered wife going back for more?

I was coming out of the National Gallery yesterday, stepping over one of the Muses in the floor mosaics ... when I stopped and thought,"What a very 1930s face!"
Now how many dozens, even hundreds of times, have I walked over these mosaics before and barely given them a glance? But sure enough, my Muse turned out to be Greta Garbo. In the National Gallery.
And then I started looking properly. And there was Churchill in a tin hat. And a Mitford sister and Virginia Woolf. And TS Eliot contemplating the Loch Ness monster. And Fred Hoyle as a steeplejack and Augustus John making inappropriate advances to Alice in Wonderland. The mosaicist Boris Anreps clearly had a sense of humour. But what really made me giggle was the corner depicting the Pleasures of Life. Well, I quite agree that a Christmas pudding is a pleasure ... but who would have thought of mud pies! I don't suppose there's another artist in the entire National Gallery collection who depicted mud pies.
And they were a Pleasure ... in fact, I think I enjoyed them more than the exhibition I'd come to see.
The information desk has a free leaflet if you're passing through and would like a key to who's who underfoot.

Sadly, it's our last chance to see Alan Rickman if not to hear that wonderful voice. (He's the voice of the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland which has yet to be released.) Seems as if everybody else had the same idea this morning because the cinema was packed and they were turning people away.
Well, you couldn't get anything more different from Sense and Sensibility - but I was completely gripped by Eye in the Sky, which is a jolly good thriller.

For the last couple of nights, I've been settling down after dinner with Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy, the latest tranche of the BBC's utterly thrilling series The Hollow Crown which is coming next month. (Is it really three years since the last instalment? It can't be!)
Why wasn't Shakespeare like this when I did it at school and always found the history plays dreary?
Everybody you've ever heard of is in it ... and you're on the edge of your seat even though you know what's coming next. Sophie Okenedo is a brilliantly evil Margaret of Anjou and if I'd been at the Rose Theatre in 1592 I'd have been hissing.
I get very excited these days when I see Edward IV ever since spending a night in his bedroom last summer in the tower where he was imprisoned at Warwick Castle.  I sat up until the early hours curled up in the window seat hoping for a ghost. Actually,  this Shakespearean Edward is greasy-haired and shaggy, and the ghost I'd packed my best M&S nightie for was the handsome chap from The White Queen series.

Next up, Richard III - and Benedict Cumberbatch is shaping up nicely as a blood-chilling villain creepily kissing those babies...