Muriel Zagha

Many thanks from me and @suzanneraine.bsky.social Very encouraging! 🌷

A wonderful review of Garlic&Pearls from a listener with an impeccable taste in podcasts. A little more below 👇

Top of the Pops (2nd March 1978). Kate Bush performs Wuthering Heights. Currently sitting at number five in the hit parade, the following week it would knock ABBA off the top spot and remain there for a month.

a woman is asking another woman why are you so obsessed with me ? ALT: a woman is asking another woman why are you so obsessed with me ?

The French, collectively, after listening to this week’s ep of Garlic&Pearls about French baddies:

This week on the Garlic&Pearls podcast I unravel for @suzanneraine.bsky.social
why so many film villains happen to be French. From dissolute sophisticates to duplicitous manipulators and downright sadistic megalomaniacs, what do these colourful imaginary French figures tell us about Frenchness?

There is a light and it never goes out.

We at Garlic & Pearls love films: they tell us so much that is fascinating about Frenchness and Britishness. One of our listeners shares this interest and has been tracking the films mentioned on the podcast in a dedicated Letterboxd list! Thank you so much: we are thrilled!

What? French villains, you say? Surely not!

Gallic Gen Z are turning their backs on France’s tradition of ‘proper’ lunches with colleagues, good food, wine and conversation breaking up the working day says @thetimes.com - illustrating this with Manet’s scandalous Déjeuner sur l’herbe, recently discussed in an episode of Garlic&Pearls…

In praise of French brothels In the days of the Belle Époque and Jazz Age, a trip to Paris would have included, for the discerning tourist, a visit to the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame and the Comédie Française, but also to Le Chabana...

spectator.com/article/in-p...

French Brothels of the Golden Age: Sex, theatricality, escapism! Podcast Episode · Garlic & Pearls · 16/01/2026 · 1h 5m

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/g...

Fame at last! I have made it into @privateeyenews.bsky.social - a Anglophile’s dream come true. I dearly wish the iguanodons line were mine but it belongs to Pierre Mac Orlan.
Links to my @thespectator1828.bsky.social article and @garlicandpearls.bsky.social episode are in replies 👇

Wild things that make your heart sing on Garlic&Pearls this week, as @suzanneraine.bsky.social tells me the story of the film Kes, which, echoing Barry Hines’s extraordinary source novel A Kestrel for a Knave, gave a voice to the South Yorkshire working class.

🌷

A terrific review of the Garlic&Pearls podcast to put a spring in our step on a Monday! Many thanks: @suzanneraine.bsky.social and I are much encouraged! Next part 👇

Thank you, Jonathan: this looks very interesting. The Innocents is one of my favourite Henry James adaptations, along with Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady.

Christopher Frayling on the making of The Innocents (1961) The Innocents, Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw, is a wonderful film, and this documentary...

It's rightly been said that even monochrome behind-the scenes photographs of The Innocents are terrifying.

The sitter in Sarah Purser's portrait is direct and intense and hints at the presence of that mysterious inner-world, which resides within us all. Purser's use of a cropped composition, a motif she used repeatedly throughout her portraiture, offers a tender and meditative work.

Drop a crush from your youth.

No cheating, your last saved pic of a celebrity is your therapist

Oh dear

This week on the Garlic&Pearls podcast, hope is a thing with wings. @suzanneraine.bsky.social tells me about what may well be the quintessential British film: Ken Loach's Kes, adapted from the novel A Kestrel For A Knave by Barry Hines.
Tune in! 👇

Urchin Rebel Bonds With Wild Kestrel: Ken Loach's Kes – Quintessential British Film Podcast Episode · Garlic & Pearls · 20 February · 51m

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/g...

This week on the Garlic&Pearls podcast, hope is a thing with wings. @suzanneraine.bsky.social tells me about what may well be the quintessential British film: Ken Loach's Kes, adapted from the novel A Kestrel For A Knave by Barry Hines.
Tune in! 👇

I bet it was gorgeously heavy, too.

2/2 15-year-old Maria Maddalena wears some A+ jewelry to have her portrait painted by Pourbus. She did not get this at Target!

Archduchess Maria Maddalena of Austria, later Grand Duchess of Tuscany, dressing the part at age 15 in 1604. Painted by Frans Pourbus of Antwerp, whose day is today.

Director Tony Scott, an embodiment of Eighties aesthetics, went on to make Top Gun.

I watched The Hunger as part of a short Bowie-on-film season. Most of it feels like a Visage video, not necessarily a bad thing but the absence of any actual story is a problem. The Barbican-set was plonked on with no connexion to the plot. Deneuve glides throughout like a golden sphinx.

Our Garlic&Pearls listeners have impeccable taste and are not afraid to show it. Thank you: @suzanneraine.bsky.social and I are much encouraged. Onwards and upwards.