Author Archives: Jonathan Buckmaster

The gift of sound and vision: Review of ‘The Great Victorian Moving Picture Show’ @ BFI IMAX

Posted on October 19, 2018 by Jonathan Buckmaster

Me and My Two Friends (1898) Taking my seat within the IMAX for this brilliantly enchanting show, I felt a strange sense of inbetweenness, a kind of Whovian inkling of being geographically located in one place but in temporal terms … Continue reading →

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Watching the Detectives: Review of Pete Orford’s “‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’: Charles Dickens’ Unfinished Novel and our Endless Attempts to End It”

Posted on August 6, 2018 by Jonathan Buckmaster

The introductory chapter of this thoughtful and engaging book concludes with the Beckettian image of the elusive cipher Dick Datchery frozen in the final moment of the Drood serial as Dickens had written it. Datchery endlessly repeats the act of eating his … Continue reading →

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Kathryn the grate: the strange assault of Emily Bronte

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Jonathan Buckmaster

Due to routine domestic demands of a twin-related nature, I didn’t get round to reading Kathryn Hughes’s essay ‘The Bronte Myth’ (Guardian Review, 21 July 2018) until my Monday morning commute. Well before then, however, it seemed to have provoked some … Continue reading →

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A Pleasant Haunting: The BBC’s ‘A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong’

Posted on January 18, 2018 by Jonathan Buckmaster

Here at VNB Towers, nothing says Christmas like ‘Quality Street’ chocolates. The Regency couple on the packaging – Miss Sweetly and Major Quality – may have quadrilled their way into the sunset, and the solidly dependable tin container may have … Continue reading →

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A Tale of Christmas High Spirits

Posted on January 4, 2018 by Jonathan Buckmaster

At this time of year, VNB is always on the eager lookout for references to A Christmas Carol in unlikely settings – Kim Jong Un calling Trump “a fragment of an underdone potato” at a Pyongyang rally, ill-judged reggae tribute bands called Marley’s … Continue reading →

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Wearing the damned hat: The interesting case(s) of Dr Watson and Mr Holmes

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Jonathan Buckmaster

Over the past few days, I’ve had the opportunity to watch two recent Sherlock Holmes remediations – BBC’s Sherlock Christmas special ‘The Abominable Bride’ (originally aired on 1st January 2016) and Mr Holmes (another BBC product, originally released in UK … Continue reading →

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Preview of BBC’s ‘Dickensian’

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Jonathan Buckmaster

What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept … Continue reading →

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Exhibition Review: “The Fallen Woman” at the Foundling Museum, London

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Jonathan Buckmaster

This exhibition not only aims to delineate the figure of the fallen woman as a cultural construct, but also re-listen to the voices of these women and reconstruct their tangible presence for us over 150 years later. The Founding Hospital was … Continue reading →

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Fading to Gray: Review of ‘Effie Gray’ (Sovereign Films, 2014)

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Jonathan Buckmaster

It seems that big screen portrayals of John Ruskin are like omnibuses; you wait ages for one to turn up, and then … In Mr Turner, Ruskin was a minor comic foil wittering about in the shadow of the lumbering, … Continue reading →

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Accept No Imitations? Pondering Holmes’s Legacy in Anthony Horowitz’s ‘Moriarty’

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Jonathan Buckmaster

Warning: This post contains spoilers. Moriarty is written by Anthony Horowitz, who, according to Orion, “may have committed more (fictional) murders than any other living author”. However, in this, his second Sherlock Holmes novel, he also attempts to perform acts of … Continue reading →

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