I. R. Cragg

What a strange film...., 23 Sep 2012

It's difficult to know where to begin with a film like Haxan, which challenges any attempt to tie it down to a category or description. Part documentary and part dramatic reconstruction, it comes across as a fairly fluid consideration of the medieval world view and the reasons why this led to witchcraft panics but emphasises the human cost in terms of people tortured and killed for the most fleeting of reasons. The visuals are often fascinatingly outlandish, but the performances are strong and communicate everything you need to know without a spoken soundtrack. Certainly recommended, but don't sit down and expect to be entertained for a couple of hours- this is a film which does require… Read more

The difficult second volume...., 12 Aug 2012

If 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo', the first volume in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, was an impressive self-contained mystery, 'The Girl who Played with Fire' is a worthy follow-up but also very different in approach. The emphasis is very much on answering a lot of the questions about Lisbeth Salander's background before her involvement with Milton Security, and interestingly Larsson chooses to achieve this by keeping Salander and Mikael Blomkvist apart for most of the novel- they're only physically in the same room at the very end of the book. Having Salander suspected of multiple murders means that Blomkvist (and a team of new characters from the Stockholm police) have to dig… Read more

A moving text, but formatting unworthy of OUP, 30 July 2012

This is a fantastically moving work of literature, particularly the last couple of chapters covering Scott's journals from the South Pole to his final camp, but my enjoyment of the Kindle version was ruined from first to last by the absolutely diabolical formatting. As might be expected of a book dealing with exploration, there are quite a few tables and lists reproduced throughout and I don't think that a single one is easily legible. There are also typos aplenty- "Charter" for "Chapter" several times for a start- and this edition is a blot on Oxford University Press's reputation as a serious publisher of literary texts. In fact, I'm not sure that such slapdash work isn't disrespectful… Read more