Ray Schaufeld's blog

Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan are good-looking and they act well. The dialogue is a bit clunky and in places unintentionally comic and the pace sometimes slow. The bits where he inflicts pain on her; I shut my eyes 'cos I'm squeamish, I sometimes watch Casualty on TV and shut my peepers when the blood spurts. Mr Grey is not only a man who likes sexually dominant role-play he is a control freak. Whenever Anastasia wants to end the relationship...

It's about the Pendle Witches hanged in 1612. I picked it for the author not the topic, witch stories, whether in Salem, Lancashire or Bideford in Devon where Mary Trembles and Susannah Edwards were the last two English witches hanged have a miserable inevitability. Misogyny, superstition, the rabble and the powers that be ganging up on impoverished women who sometimes believe the hocus pocus because it affords them a little power; execution. A...

I get pretty much all my facts from Fiction. No wonder my quiz team has yet to win, it's a good thing we have one person who knows a lot about sport or we would fare far worse, but this is my comfort zone for the acquisition of knowledge. When I don't understand something in a book I then try the often maligned Wikipaedia. Books on social studies are sort of like guys I have a brief fling with but wouldn't take home; I flip though them briefly...

Sheenagh is serious. About whatever and whoever in the world she chooses to care for! Could be Geordie boys carrying their future hopes and meagre baggage, on the London train, the post-apocalyptic universe, her travels to Iceland, snooker... Warmth sits alongside conceptual and imaginative breadth, here is someone who cares about the environment and would like to see us husband it better. She has also written a book about 'fan-fic' where...

I've given this a try and I can't get into it. It's a story set in smalltown USA about a single Dad with two sons who takes in a schoolgirl Mum. It's OK, I suppose it simply gives me nothing new and hasn't any laughs unless I've skipped them. I liked George Eliot's Silas Marner a lot when I read it, so I've nowt against single Dad tales per se but GE's had more to it; the broken-hearted barmaid mother dying of an OD, the story of Silas'...

Boxes of treats! The Arts Council started this annual competition in 1992 publishing the top entries There is serious prize money for best collection, best first collection and best first poem.Usually around 140 pages of solid quality,and illustrates true diversity of style and topic. There appears to be no length limit either min or max to the entries. Quirky poems by names unknown to me stand out The last Cafe in the West by Stephen Plaice in...

'They're just a bunch of trees.' Wrong! Woods can tip us topsy-turvey, grannies become wolves, witches jump out at us stealing babies to imprison for life because they can't let go, giants quake the ground. There are love-rat princes, weird magic beans and worst of all we can lose the path. Lost in the woods! Stephen Sondheim's clever musical travels well to the screen.Several fairy tales are meshed together in a singing, running, suspenseful...

A confused elderly lady thinks her old buddy has gone missing and suspects foul play. In the words of Vicky Pollard 'yeh but no but yeh' and I'm not going to give away what surfaces from the buried wreckage of World War II, from Maud's mind as she drifts through 'the foggy ruins of time' (Dylan quote), from a back garden, oops slight spoiler there. Elizabeth is Missing does a lot of things really well, Maud's first person narrative is real-...

To call Les Murray the Aussie Seumas Heaney is selling them both short though both are the Big Countrymen of their land. Les does land, place, people seeing and feeling the land, people working the smalltown sawmills of his beginnings, creatures, Nature all done par excellence. Also a sense of the era, a working class son of the 50's going to uni, travelling previously unheard of distances to barroom debates of books and politics, a real feel of...

I never knew my mother's birthplace was so strange! Written by a journalist from neighbouring Poland, these are snappy, true and anecdotally sort-of-true tales from the Czech half of the Czech Republic. The introductory timeline is essential. Czechoslovakia went from being a mittel-europa kingdom to a Hitlerite state in 1939 then a Stalinist state from the 50's until the Velvet Revolution in 1968.(this is not to be confused with the Velvet...