BY ROGER WATSON Starring Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins, Locked (2025) is a comeuppance film where a petty thief and all-round streetwise lowlife suffers for his crimes – one crime in particular – in a fairly horrible way. Skarsgård, or Bill Istvan Günther Skarsgård, has appeared in a few films of note, none of which I have seen and in mainly minor roles. While I liked his … Continue reading Locked
BY JAMIE FOSTER A Hilariously Honest Look at the Animal Rights Debate John Nash’s ‘Animal Rights: Complete & Utter Bullsh*t’ isn’t your typical animal rights book. Forget the preachy tone and guilt-tripping; Nash delivers a refreshing, irreverent, and ultimately insightful exploration of this complex and often-polarised topic. He achieves this through a blend of sharp wit, historical context, and a healthy dose of common sense, … Continue reading A Review of ‘Animal Rights: Complete & Utter Bullsh*t’
BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE 12:30 pm, The Beaujolais, Soho. A meeting with Cloe. Behind us, a table of lunching women – that is, women who don’t lunch. About their bones, dresses hang like sheets caught on a telephone pole. One braves a grain of mozzarella, hesitates on it, and then returns it to the plate. ‘Filling, isn’t it?’ she asks. The plate is one of two … Continue reading The Secret
BY ROGER WATSON Published under the auspices of the Bruges Group, Green in tooth and claw by Niall McCrae, no stranger to the pages of CSM, is an action packed tour through scams perpetuated by the green movement. This is not a scientific treatise demolishing the green movement, especially its Malthusian ‘zero carbon’ slogan. For that, see Not Zero by Ross Clark. Rather it is … Continue reading Green in Tooth and Claw
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Ask anyone but politicians anywhere around Europe what they think of politicians, and you’ll get groans. You’ll also hear words like “low calibre” and “disconnected”. You’ll receive whingeing about “short-termism”, “career politicians” and “reacting only to polls”. There is no coincidence in this. In the Internet age we are all interconnected as never before, and politicians, under far too much scrutiny, are … Continue reading Europe’s Leadership Famine
BY ROGER WATSON In Banalysis, Frank Haviland tackles an unpopular subject: that people are different from one another. To even the casual observer it is obvious that people are different, but to say so these days is virtually an anathema. In our increasingly homogenised world, we are expected to accept that nobody wins a race, they merely participate. Nobody fails an examination; instead they receive … Continue reading Banalysis
BY JAMIE FOSTER Surprisingly, this is only the second biography of Nicola Sturgeon ever published. The last one came out in 2015, and so has been overtaken by events. More importantly, this book is founded almost exclusively on what the First Minister said in parliament. It is not a collection of media stories, nor a bloodless academic “assessment”. It is the unarguable truth of what … Continue reading A New Book about Nicola Sturgeon
BY ALEXIA JAMES In 1975, David Shepherd wrote his autobiography ‘The Man Who Loves Giants’. Even though he was only 44, he had already achieved more than most could have in three lifetimes. Right up until his death in 2017, he continued to paint a huge variety of subjects; founded the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation (which has, to date, raised over £10 million); renovated and … Continue reading David Shepherd – Artist and Conservationist
Back in 1999, two plucky, independent filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez released a strange, terrifying mockumentary called The Blair Witch Project at the Sundance Film Festival. The story concerns three documentary filmmakers who disappeared into the Black Hills in Burkittsville, Maryland, in 1994, their footage being found a year later. Around the time of its release, a deluge of horror films, including seventies and … Continue reading Post Blair Witch
BY ANDREW MOODY Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s 2001-03 mockumentary The Office is leaving Netflix on the 29th of June. Most people are familiar with the TV show, at the turn of the century this charming, hilarious (and very English) comedy hit pay dirt, and Gervais was catapulted to rockstar status. Now twenty years since it first hit TV screens, it seems like the right … Continue reading The Enduring Office
BY ANDREW MOODY In 2008, several years before either Game of Thrones or The Crown debuted on TV, Eric Bana starred as Henry the VIII in The Other Boleyn Girl, opposite starlets Natalie Portman and Scarlet Johannson who played Anne and Mary Boleyn. Now the movie has reached streaming service Netflix. After compulsively gorging on the first four seasons of Peter Morgan’s The Crown, I … Continue reading The Other Boleyn Girl
BY ANDREW MOODY During the Covid 19 pandemic and resultant lockdown in the UK, one of the few trades that continued on at pace was that of illicit drugs. New to Netflix is a six part documentary series The Business of Drugs that is equally educational to drug addicts and those who have never taken any illegal substance, as well as being a fascinating research … Continue reading The Business of Drugs
BY ANDREW MOODY It will never be conclusively proven that billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. In the recent Netflix show Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich (based on James Patterson’s book), the idea that Epstein was murdered in a prison hit, ordered from high above, is considered. It was in production nine months before his arrest on sex trafficking charges, and the film makers used the … Continue reading Filthy Rich
BY ANDREW MOODY I may be a simple Kensington girl with a modest trust fund and a thirst for justice, but it is my destiny to guide your generation to a new world order. I’m like a younger, hotter, female version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and you are my rats. So writes everyone’s favourite ecosexual, socialist, trans-disabled, intersectional feminist, Titania McGrath, who returns … Continue reading #StayWoke
BY ANDREW MOODY At 1.51 am on Halloween 1993, Dr Paul Silka at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre officially pronounced River Jude Phoenix dead. He was 23. Just over an hour before, at 12.45 am, he had been given a cup of liquid containing a speed ball of cocaine and heroin. Shortly after, he collapsed inside Johnny Depp’s Hollywood club The Viper Room, before being taken outside, … Continue reading Last Night at the Viper Room
BY ANDREW MOODY Academy Award winning filmmaker and Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone has divided audiences for decades. His obsession with liberal politics and war guilt over America’s participation in what he claims are illegal wars make him one of the most contentious major filmmakers in Hollywood. His recent memoir Chasing the Light: How I Fought My Way into Hollywood is essential reading for fans of … Continue reading Chasing the Light
BY ANDREW MOODY Gary Gilmore was once as famous as most movie stars or athletes. Parodies of him played on Saturday Night Live. Johnny Cash called him on Death Row. Gilmore had been released from prison after twelve and a half years, spent nine months of freedom falling back into petty crime, developed a relationship with a teenage divorcee, before randomly killing two men. He … Continue reading The Executioner’s Song
BY ANDREW MOODY In my younger days, I was introduced to The Smiths, the eighties guitar band founded by Morrissey and Johnny Marr. I was immediately drawn to their melancholy music, it spoke of a world of loneliness and poverty, of sexual ambiguity, of criminality. Johnny Marr was clearly a guitar prodigy, and Morrissey’s defiant vocal and poetic lyrics touched me in a way that … Continue reading Autobiography
BY ANDREW MOODY With Halloween fast approaching, amidst a global pandemic where world governments can shut down their respective populations inside their homes at a whim, you could do worse than revisiting George A Romero’s zombie trilogy for a night where the streets will be eerily empty of trick or treaters. Made on a shoestring budget back in 1968 by a group of enterprising advertising … Continue reading Knight of the Living Dead
BY ANDREW MOODY Sir Ian Kershaw’s Hitler – a vast, two volume work – ranks amongst the very best studies of Nazism: “Hitler stood for at least some things they [German people] admired, and for many had become the symbol and embodiment of the national revival which the Third Reich had in many respects been perceived to accomplish.” It is split into two distinct halves: … Continue reading Where Books Are Burnt
