The Round-Up: April 2025

A monthly miscellany of interesting links and tidbits

• Here’s something fascinating for anyone who loves George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the novel and the wonderful 1994 miniseries: a webpage where you can read the text of the novel, the shooting script and the post-production script side by side, with notes and commentary on the adaptation.

• An excellent, important piece from Ted Gioia on the disturbing trend of the flat, mechanical, emotionless personality becoming the most dominant type of “hero” character in popular culture. Apropos of the Leone/Eastwood “spaghetti westerns” playing a role in introducing it to American film, Gioia is right on the money in pointing out that such a character as hero is utterly foreign to the original Western genre (and I’d argue to the real pioneer Westerner too…perhaps a subject for a future post).

• A lovely appreciation of the classic Miss Marple adaptations starring Joan Hickson, from Lady Metroland. (I did a personal ranking of them a few years ago, which still reflects my thoughts pretty well, though I think I’d drop They Do It With Mirrors one or two spots down if I was to reorder them now.)

• If you’re a book lover you may remember Fake Britain, the comprehensive map of fictional locations in the British Isles. I learned recently that it’s been expanded to cover the entire world, in book form: the Atlas of Imagined Places. What a fun coffee-table book that sounds!

• The auto-generated mini biography for Anthony Trollope on IMDB cracks me up. (It seems funny to think of all the authors that have IMDB pages…but anyone who has had a book adapted to film is on there, which covers quite a lot of ground.)

• At Y’allogy, Derrick Jeter shares a vivid first-person account of one cowboy’s experiences driving cattle up the Chisholm Trail.

• An interesting piece from Ann Kennedy Smith about a difficult stretch in Alfred Tennyson’s writing career, during a period of anxiety over the threat of war between France and England, and his wife Emily’s role involvement in and support of her husband’s work.

• A bit of beauty for your day: a solo rendition of “Amazing Grace” on cello with the Irish coast for a backdrop.

• And in case you missed it, here’s this month’s bite-sized bit of flash fiction:

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