Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

lack of time or having more pressing deadlines for other projects to meet. Consequently, without the involvement of
these academics in the feature, the feature was ignored, and failed to garner any online interest, despite being
viewed thousands of times within the first few hours of it being online.
Recently, Tim and I were discussing these issues via email, and I suggested to him that he formulate his opinions on
the subject as an article, so that they could be accumulated in one place and read by others. He readily agreed, and
consequently wrote the article mentioned above.
My thanks to him for taking the time to write it.
Review of Christopher Plummer’s Memoirs
25 October 2019
Christopher Plummer’s In Spite of Myself is one of the best showbiz memoirs I’ve read. It’s very long (over 600 pages)
but never boring, largely due to Plummer’s narrative skill, wit and charm.
A large part of the book reads like a Who’s Who of the American and British theatre of the 1950s and 1960s, with
Plummer having worked with most major theatrical figures of those decades, from Elia Kazan to Peter Hall. And his
friendships have also ranged widely, including figures such as Noël Coward, Rex Harrison, Laurence Olivier,
Katharine Hepburn, Raymond Massey and Jason Robards. He is always generous towards everyone he mentions,
even to those who have treated him unfairly, either professionally or personally; and he is always self-deprecating.
He is, perhaps, better known for his film work (particularly in The Sound of Music) but a major part of his career has
been in the theatre, on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1960s, he was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company,
living in Britain for a large part of that decade. And amongst the major theatrical classical roles he’s played
throughout his career are Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V, Richard III and King Lear.
The book is also full of interesting detail about Plummer’s more personal life: his visits to different countries (he’s
extremely well travelled), his favourite hotels and restaurants, his house moving adventures, and movingly about the
deaths of his pet dogs, which he kept in the 1980s and 1990s.
As you can imagine for a 600-plus-page book, there is far more in it than I have been able to touch on here, so I highly
recommend it-especially to anyone interested in theatre and film of the past 60 years.
An Old Poem I Wrote
22 January 2020
Here’s an old poem by me that I just came across again after many years. I wrote it around 1991. It’s never been
published.
The Threshold of Jove’s Court
I told them to enter
and see the lamenter
who was a repenter
and became an assenter
to fall to the centre
and become a consenter
and be a frequenter
noble dissenter
and upset tormenter
and bookish augmenter
to make the restrictions
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