Rapscallion Magazine Feature: English journeys – high explosives, shopping lists and ancient earthworks on Brean Down in Somerset
By Harry Mottram: I picked up the piece of paper on Brean Down by the fort. It was a shopping…
Rapscallion Magazine Radio Review: Spies, Stalin and Sir Anthony Blunt analysed in David Cannadine’s radio expose – and the evening I sat opposite the Cambridge spy and ‘fourth man’
Radio Review: BBC Archive on 4 programme Anthony Blunt: A Question of Retribution? By Harry Mottram: It’s not everyday you…
Rapscallion Magazine Feature: Rotring pens, Letraset and PMTS – the last of the paste up artists from a lost age of graphic design when we all smoked and had lunch time booze ups
By Harry Mottram: Not only a lost age for graphics but a lost age for many offices and studios when…
Rapscallion Magazine Book Review: A coming of age novella where two French school girls discuss love, marriage, parents… and the God question – in The Inseparables, by Simone de Beauvoir
Book Review: The Inseparables, by Simone de Beauvoir Do you believe in God? The question is one of the themes…
RAPSCALLION MAGAZINE Feature: the good, the bad and the downright dodgy – the crazy world of football’s oddballs – the goalkeeper
Goalkeeping and dodgy goalies, By Harry Mottram As Joe Royle once said, “all goalkeepers are mad.” Nobody except a fool,…
Rapscallion Magazine Radio Review: Evelyn Waugh’s wartime drama Put Out More Flags is given a rich vocal texture in BBC Radio 4 Extra production
Radio Review: Evelyn Waugh – Put Out More Flags There’s something very louche in Anthony Valentine’s voice as Basil Seal…
Rapscallion Magazine Book Review: the coming of age story of Gothic fantasy obsessed Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
Rapscallion Magazine Book Review: Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen Part Gothic send-up, part coming of age bildungsroman novel and part…
Rapscallion Magazine: National Treasure? Dame Maggie Smith was my step Godmother! (Well not quite but there is a rather tenuous link to this family myth)
By Harry Mottram: She may have been Dame Maggie Smith to the world of theatre, the movies and TV dramas…
Rapscallion Magazine Book Review: the grim reality of Franco’s Fascist Spain in the aftermath of the civil war in a story of survival, love and loss in CJ Sansom’s novel Winter In Madrid
Rapscallion Magazine Book Review: Winter In Madrid, by C.J. Sansom. It was one of those ‘what it’ moments in World…
Rapscallion Magazine Book Review: keeping it real in an engrossing, amusing and life affirming novel – in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies
Book Review: The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster The opening line of the novel seems at odds as to what…