Best Feature Horror Film for 2025
Fans of horror films were able to wallow (mostly in blood) at the recent Austin Horror Film Festival. The armadillo stole the show in the feature film McConadilla, directed by…
JANE AUSTEN: Facts are such horrid things!
Several books are being published this year to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen, one of England’s most enduring authors. The one under review here should…
GRIMM TALES Ballet: Redux
Back in 2019, I saw (and reviewed) the premiere of Grimm Tales, a new ballet by Artistic Director Stephen Mills. A link to my original review is below. This revival…
Oxford University in the 18th Century
The only real problem with this massive volume is the fact that it is so massive! At 819 pages, it is actually difficult to hold for any length of time.…
THE FRAGILITY OF THE HUMAN HEART: Eugene Onegin in Houston
Eugene Onegin explores the fragility of the human heart and how unspoken words can shape destinies. That description of the famous ballet, set to the music of Tchaikovsky, is by…
IMAGINATION: The Brain’s Meeting Place for Opposites
Image: John Donne (1572-1631) This book on imagination in English literature of the 1500s and early 1600s is edited by professors at two institutions in Canada (their bio data is…
Architectural Images and Early Modern Science
The intersection between architecture and science in the 1500s is one that remains largely unexplored. By looking at the art of Wendel Dietterlin (1550–1599) a whole new approach to the…
An Inclination to Rest in Uncertainty
Even before Shakespeare wrote “hap by hap may” in Taming of the Shrew in 1623, Raphael Holinshed employed the phrase “the hap of things” in his famed 1587 book Chronicles.…
Nothing can be compared to you, Rome
Image: Emperor Maximilian I My headline comes from a poem written in the 12th century, but its opening line does not prepare one for the punchline. The four lines in…
The Rebel Romanov
Placing Julie of Saxe-Coburg in the tangled web of European royalty is actually quite easy: she was the niece of England’s Queen Victoria. And she came very close to being…