Getting to Grips With Tom’s “doubled-ended charisma“ “Inee lahvelee?” So says pretty much everyone in Legend about Tom Hardy’s looks. And the latest re-telling of the story of Ronald and Reginald Kray, the sharp-suited, impeccably-groomed, glamorous gangster twins who ruled 1960s London’s underworld, is a mostly enjoyable movie which often gladdens… Read More »The Dazzling Bi-Brilliance of Tom Hardy
Saw Hue & Cry t’other night on the tellybox for the first time since I was a nipper. This recently digitally restored kid-oriented Ealing Comedy presents as its climax a London-wide mobilisation of boys (and a few tom-boys) for a ‘big adventure’ – beating up baddies that the police had… Read More »Bomb-Damaged London & Its Bomb-Damaged Kids
Mark Simpson on the (fast diminishing) difference between fame and legend (The Hospital Club magazine, Spring 2010) A recent bloody assassination attempt on Gore Vidal, the last great American man of letters by the English journalist Christopher Hitchens in the glossy pages of Vanity Fair prompted me, and I suspect… Read More »The Legendary Test