So I may have mentioned before that I have been in a bit of a reading slump recently, but that seems mainly to be about fiction. I am solidly working my way through a number of non-fiction books at the moment, and the first I’ve finished is It’s Only a Movie by the one and only Mark Kermode.

Those of you who wander over to my other blog will know that I love movies and one of the critics whose opinions I pay most attention to (even though I don’t always agree with him) is the Good Doctor Mark Kermode. His Friday afternoon reviews with Simon Mayo on Radio Five Live are a real joy and the podcast is one of my Saturday morning rituals. So good fun to read his memoir, subtitled “reel life adventures of a film obsessive”.

It has all the great stories that those of you who follow the Good Doctor have heard before (his brush with Helen Mirren who took him to task for saying The Queen wasn’t a proper film, Werner Herzog being shot while Mark was interviewing him, and so on), plus some new stuff that I hadn’t come across before (the trip to the Soviet Union to visit the set of Dark Waters). The only thing missing are the great rants about films he doesn’t like (Pirates of the Caribbean a special favourite) so if you can search these out on YouTube or elsewhere because when he’s in full flow there is nothing more wonderful.

It’s difficult to review this – I thoroughly enjoyed it, one of the few books I could be bothered trying to read while standing up on my daily commute, precariously balanced but any man who

grew up believing that Planet of the Apes told you all that you needed to know about politics, that Slade in Flame was a savage expose of the pop world, and that The Exorcist revealed the meaning of life

deserves to be listened to.