Articles > Culture

Thor opened in theaters this last month, and while the general census on it was positive, it was mixed nonetheless. I ended up seeing it twice. I was on the fence about it the first time around, but really enjoyed it the second. It's a fun movie, exceptionally well-cast, and only dragged down by being heavier on the drama than you'd like it to be. The one thing everyone seems to be able to agree on is that this movie could have easily been alot worse. That seems appropriate, as the same is true for the god of thunder...

I don’t seem to do much of these any more. I kind of got out of the habit when I had a small baby in the house and there really was no time to watch TV or read books but now that the small baby has grown into a slightly larger baby and seems to have discovered some of the merits of actually sleeping some of the time. Also I’m not sure how much people like me doing short reviews of older material that most people are familiar with. But now I have a bit more space I’ve actually built...

Last week I spent my holiday on Rhodes, the smallish Greek island with a grand history, just off the Turkish coast. Cities sprang up here around 3,000 years ago, providing legendary Olympic boxing champions and some great classical philosophers. Later, its rethorical schools provided crucial stages in the education of the Roman elite, among whom Caesar. However, the civil war that ended the republic of Rome also led to the destruction of Rhodes.

We live in an age where, thanks to a combination of the increasing pentration of nerd culture into the mainstream and the rise of computer-controlled special effects, science fiction and fantasy TV serials have become not only more common but, in general, rather better than their predecessors were. So it’s perhaps surprising that I watch very, very few of them. Mostly this is because of length: I just cannot commit myself to the sort of long-running series that US TV networks favour not only because of the total time involved but because of a nagging suspicion that writers tend...

I read quite widely, but my literary diet certainly includes a fair amount of military history. Because I don’t read that much military history I generally prefer to focus on “big picture” books, the sort of thing that looks at history from a very high level, covering a campaign or even a whole war in a single book. Inevitably these sorts of books don’t generally dwell on individuals beyond the high command and spend virtually no time looking at conditions on the ground. I’m conscious this gives me a fairly one-sided and warped view of warfare but sadly I...