thu 31/10/2024

police

Boris Akunin: Black City review - a novel to sharpen the wits

It is 1914 – a fateful year for assassinations, war and revolution. The fictional Erast Petrovich Fandorin, the protagonist of Boris Akunin’s series of historical thrillers, is an elegant, eccentric sometime government servant, spy and diplomat, as...

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Michael Connelly: Dark Sacred Night review - a pairing of loner detectives

The master of the Southern California police procedural is back. In Dark Sacred Night Michael Connelly puts centre stage his oldest creation, the Vietnam veteran turned original, ethical policeman who marches to his own moralities, Hieronymous – aka...

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Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead review - on vengeful nature

In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible revenge. The bodies of murdered men, united in their...

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Unforgotten, Series 3, ITV review - death on the M1

So it’s back to London’s Bishop Street police station for a third series of screenwriter Chris Lang’s cold case saga. The understated rapport of lead duo DI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and DS Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) has become one of TV’s...

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DVD: The Nile Hilton Incident

The world was captivated by the Arab Spring – thousands of citizens rising up in unity against longstanding dictatorships, filling squares and refusing to bow. But for many of us, it was a world away; the crowds were a single organism, thinking and...

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The Bridge, BBC Two, series 4 review - Scandi saga is darker than ever

In the 1990s, which brought us Morse, Fitz and Jane Tennison, an idea took root that all television detectives must be mavericks. They needed to be moody, dysfunctional, addictive, a bit of an unsolved riddle. These British sleuths were all...

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Stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation, BBC One review - ‘He was a cool guy and everybody loved him’

When doctors told Doreen Lawrence her son had died she thought, "That’s not true." Spending time with his body in the hospital, aside from a cut on his cheek, it seemed to her he was sleeping. The death of a child will always be strange, and in the...

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Law and Order, BBC Four review - not a fair cop

In the late 1970s the British establishment sustained a bloody nose. Roland Huntford published his debunking of Captain Scott and Anthony Blunt was outed as the Fourth Man, while the Old Etonian Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe was tried for...

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DVD: Queerama

Last year, the BFI commemorated the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality with the release of Queerama, part of its Gross Indecency film season. Now available on DVD, the documentary from Daisy Asquith eschews standard...

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Collateral, series finale, BBC Two - Carey Mulligan hares to the finish

In a revelatory interview for the Royal Court’s playwright’s podcast series, David Hare admits to a thin skin. In his adversarial worldview, to take issue with him is – his word – to denounce him. He’s quite a denouncer himself, of course. In...

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Marcella, Series 2, ITV review - more twisted tales of detection

Marcella’s writer Hans Rosenfeldt was the creator of Scandi classic TV drama The Bridge, the one that made detectives with emotional disorders the flavour du jour, but you do have to wonder what kind of police force would continue to employ DS...

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Spiral, Series 6 Finale, BBC Four review - hot fuzz hit new heights

Happily, there’s hope for Spiral junkies – as series six ends, we bring you news that series seven has just gone into production. This is just as well, because these last dozen episodes have been an object lesson in how to make TV drama for the mind...

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