Month / February 2026

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Huthering Weights

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
“Wuthering Heights” (Emerald Fennell, 2026)
Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

When I was clinging onto the idea of teaching English Literature, I got three part time gigs teaching nineteenth literature. This was ironical, because as an undergraduate there was an notable gap in my Beowulf to Virginia Woolf (and up to about 1990) that was Victoria Literature. Inevitable I had to teach three different Dickens and three Eliots, but Emily saved me by only having a single surviving novel.

I suspect my only knowledge of it was Kate Bush (which I had seen) and a Cliff Richard musical (which passed me by).

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A Bishop is Born

Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper, 2025)

I saw John Bishop a few times at the Carbuncle — when he didn’t have to postpone for TV double bookings — and he was fine, if not in my top ten lives comedians. There was a backstory even then — he had abandoned some kind of sales job for another role on the road. The deeper story is that he had become estranged from his wife, inadvertantly did a comedy open mic in Manchester and realised he was good at it. One night, his soon to be ex-wife was in the audience and was someone shocked — but like what she saw and they were reconciled.

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I Feel Sorry For Joe Alwyn

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025)

Hamlet (Aneil Keira, 2025)

I guess I confess to having not read the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, so I don’t know why of the clumsinesses are Hollywood additions. Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) is the stuck at home wife in the 1590s, whilst hubby William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is gallivanting around Shoreditch and the South Bank. All she has to look forward to is childrearing and his second-best bed.

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