The teaser trailer from the new film version of "Brighton Rock"

Reviews appear mixed and some cinematic license is being taken with the text. The verdict's still out until I've seen the film.

How to use SPIDER in analysing a poem

I've used FLIRT but this is good, too.  It's a useful acronym for examining unseen poetry. Ken Archer offers clear advice here on how to read a poem and write about it.

Improving your writing

This is essential for improving both your accuracy in punctuation and expression. It much easier to show your understanding of texts if you are up-to-speed with this key AO1 skill. The links below will enable you to do this independently!

BBC Skills Writing and links to other skils

Exercises in grammar and punctuation by Bristol University

If this does not work for you, why not try a video or a song from You Tube which focuses on the skill you need to learn? I like this video as it  rams home the message home in memorable way. Find the right


Here's a link to the Nazi Grammar Police, a play on a recent Quinton Tarantino film and it's very clever, too. Link to The Grammar Nazis

The execution scene from "Captain Corelli's Mandolin"

I like the song that babenewport has chosen to go with this extract. It suits so well.

captain corellis mandolin  - why -
Uploaded by babenewport. - Explore more music videos.

The different sounds of the mandolin by John Mullan on "Captain Corelli's Mandolin"

This article from 2007 is certainly worth reading.
John Mullan's article from The Guardian on de Berniere's "Polyphonic novel".

Graham Greene on "Brighton Rock"

Graham Greene on Brighton Rock:

Brighton Rock I began in 1937 as a detective story and continued, I am sometimes tempted to think, as an error of judgment…The first fifty pages of Brighton Rock are all that remain of the detective story; they would irritate me, if I dared to look at them now, for I know I ought to have had the strength of mind to remove them, and to start the story again—however difficult the revisions might have proved — with what is now called Part Two.

...the setting of Brighton Rock may in part belong to an imaginary geographic region. Though Nelson Place has been cleared away since the war, and the Brighton race gangs were to all intents quashed forever as a serious menace at Lewes Assizes a little before the date of my novel, and even Sherry's dance hall has vanished, they certainly did exist; there was a real Nelson Place, and a man was kidnapped on Brighton front in a broad daylight of the thirties, though not in the same circumstances as Hale, and his body was found somewhere out towards the Downs flung from a car. Colleoni, the gang leader, had his real prototype who had retired by 1938 and lived a gracious Catholic life in one of the Brighton crescents, although I found his name was still law when I demanded entrance by virtue of it to a little London nightclub called The Nest behind Regent Street…

All the same I must plead guilty to manufacturing this Brighton of mine as I never manufactured Mexico or Indochina. There were no living models for these gangsters, nor for the barmaid who so obstinately refused to come alive. I had spent only one night in the company of someone who could have belonged to Pinkie's gang—a man from the Wandsworth dog-tracks whose face had been carved because he was suspected of grassing to the bogies after a killing in the stadium. (He taught me the only professional slang I knew, but one cannot learn a language in one night however long.)

...The Pinkies are the real Peter Pans – doomed to be juvenile for a lifetime. They have something of a fallen angel about them, a morality which once belonged to another place. The outlaw of justice always keeps in his heart the sense of justice outraged – his crimes have an excuse and yet he is pursued by the Others. The Others have committed worse crimes and flourish. The world is full of Others who wear the masks of Success, of a Happy Family. Whatever crime he may be driven to commit the child who doesn't grow up remains the great champion of justice. "An eye for an eye." "Give them a dose of their own medicine." As children we have all suffered punishments for faults we have not committed, but the wound has soon healed. With Raven and Pinkie the wound never heals.

from Ways of Escape, pp.56-57, 61

Captain Corelli's Mandolin - A Podcast Review (AO3)

This review tongue-in-cheek and fun. Yet the review is spoken by Tom Hewitt and Patrick Walsh,  just after their A Level studies, who obviously loved the book. This will help with understanding the text, especially for the chapter in which the Italian soldiers are massacred. I liked their banter, honesty and judgement.
Ex students review the novel.