A few days after I posted here about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, The Atlantic published another article by translator Emily Wilson, this time discussing Nolan’s version of the Trojan Horse. For its timing alone, it felt like that quote from another Homer-related property, but mainly I was annoyed that she and the article’s illustrator had spoiled Nolan’s opening scene. None of the features of Homer’s Odyssey have been a surprise to anyone for two thousand years, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to spoil in Nolan’s version.
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18 August 2026 · Film
The death of Sam Neill a few weeks ago drew a surprisingly strong reaction online. He was one of those actors who was always welcome whenever he turned up; I’d enjoyed watching him only the week before alongside Eric Bana in the Netflix series Untamed, set in Yosemite. I first saw him in the excellent ITV series Reilly: Ace of Spies in the early ’80s, and would have noticed him sooner if my family had ever watched the soapy Australian World War II drama The Sullivans, where he had his first substantial role in 1979-80.
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5 August 2026 · People
Most of the attention around AI in recent weeks has been on the nervous stock market and on hacks carried out by poorly controlled tools. Here are some more stories from the floodwaters.
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5 August 2026 · Infotech
When the trailer appeared months ago for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I was underwhelmed, although certainly not for the same reasons as the world’s richest Roman saluter; its glimpses of Matt Damon and his crew wandering around an island just didn’t offer much to get excited about. But on arrival the movie was rapturously received, so I waited until I’d seen it (on Thursday, on Imax) before reading translator Emily Wilson’s review, which had sparked an inevitable backlash, both to the movie and to her critique of it, when it went online earlier in the week.
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2 August 2026 · Film
The other day I noticed that the Russian series Better Than Us would soon be dropping off Netflix, and feeling in the mood for some near-future SF about a world of personal robots, I gave it a try; as a 2018 production, I figured it might not be too infected with the militarism of 2020s Russia. Like the Channel 4 series Humans, it was apparently inspired by the Swedish Real Humans (which I haven’t seen, but will have to track down). The Russian version is even darker in tone than the British one (still my favourite), so a few episodes in I started watching the new BBC sitcom Ann Droid alongside it to lighten the mood.
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2 August 2026 · 1 Comment · Television
Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my arrival in the UK to take up a post at the University of Edinburgh. It’s also—it’s time to acknowledge here—my first anniversary of no longer working there. In between was the best part of my academic career.
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31 July 2026 · Memory
On Monday we learned that Bill Oddie, giant of 1970s British TV as one third of The Goodies (alongside Graeme Garden and the late Tim Brooke-Taylor) and later the UK’s most beloved television birdwatcher, died on the weekend at the age of 85.
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29 July 2026 · 1 Comment · Comedy
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