Features 725
Books: The Apothecary Diaries
By Jonathan Clements. It is the ultimate in blood-sports – hundreds of the most beautiful women in the world, locked away in a palace where their sole chance of advancement is to catch the eye and bear the heir of the Emperor. Throw in scheming eunuchs, bitter sister-wife rivalries, and the ever-present danger that years […]
Mothra
by Jeremy Clarke. You’d be forgiven for assuming Mothra (1961) to be a typical Toho monster movie in which a giant moth attacks Tokyo. However, the film single-handedly redefined the genre as much as the original Godzilla film defined it.
Mission to Mars?
By Hugh David. “Abandoned artificial satellites. Tanks jettisoned from space shuttles. Refuse generated during space station construction. Debris of all shapes and sizes is travelling around the Earth at speeds of up to eight kilometres a second. Should this debris collide with a spacecraft, it could result in a terrible accident. For this reason, mankind […]
Books: The Works of Hayao Miyazaki
By Shelley Pallis. In an already crowded field of critical appraisals of Ghibli films, the Toulouse-based Third Editions offer their latest English-language publication, Gael Berton’s The Works of Hayao Miyazaki: The Japanese Animation Master. It’s a beautifully designed book, on posh paper with a pretty cover, although one immediately wonders whether the world really needs […]
Moriarty the Patriot
By Jeannette Ng. Moriarty the Patriot by Ryosuke Takeuchi and Hikaru Miyoshi is a manga that presents Professor James Moriarty (nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, here “William James Moriarty”) as a ruthless anti-hero battling class inequality, evil aristocrats and the British Empire itself. He does so through the medium of intricately plotted perfect crimes, all the […]