Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I traveled, vicariously, with a Facebook friend to the Museum of London for the new display on recently-analyzed skeletons. Tina reviewed another Inspector Banks mystery, with an emphasis on the music and the food. Sim’s virtual walk in London took her to the Ritz — ritzy, indeed. Jackie continued the recap of her 2005 trip to Ireland with a castle, shops, and the sea. Jean reviewed Stranger in the House about soldiers return from WWII and continued her readalong of the Faerie Queene. Becky reviewed The Two Towers, part of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and a true-crime tale of a child murderer in Victorian times, The Wicked Boy.
Theeb ended up in my Netflix queue because it won the award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer at the BAFTAs.
As I wrote last week, “British” can be as big as the empire, in some ways. Naji Abu Nowar, the director of Theeb, is British-Jordanian. He was born in Oxford, moved with his family to Jordan at age 10, and returned to London for college.
Theeb isn’t a great film for an Anglophile fix with just one English actor in a fairly small, but pivotal, role. On the other hand, the undercurrent of the plot is directly related to the British presence in Jordan. Set in 1916, the local people are trying to deal with the disruption in commerce created by the strategic Ottoman Railway while war rumbles far away in Europe.
