{"id":187,"date":"2003-01-23T11:59:07","date_gmt":"2003-01-23T11:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2003\/01\/the_leopard\/"},"modified":"2003-01-23T11:59:07","modified_gmt":"2003-01-23T11:59:07","slug":"the_leopard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2003\/01\/the_leopard\/","title":{"rendered":"The Leopard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some years back, back when foreign language films were shown on terrestrial television, there were a couple of series I used to watch religiously. One was Moving Pictures<\/i> presented by Howard Schuman, and the other was Moviedrome<\/i>, presented originally by Alex Cox<\/a>.
\nNow I can’t remember which of these two fine shows it was I was watching, but one of the films they were talking about was The Leopard<\/a>. Thinking again now, I believe it may well have been Moving Pictures, as I seem to recall Howard Schuman imploring us to watch the screening of The Leopard later that evening as a rare treat. I duly set the video, as it was on late at night. And of course, I never quite got around to watching the film – well it’s over three hours long.
\nSchuman also explained it was based on a book that I hadn’t previously heard of. The title was intriguing nonetheless, and over the years I saw it a few times when browsing Waterstones. At some point last year, I decided it was a travesty that I didn’t read nearly enough foreign fiction in translation. I think this came about around the same time I discovered Henning Mankell, and realised that there was an entire imprint, Harvill<\/a>, that specialised in translated material.
\nAt Christmas, I finally got around to picking up a copy of The Leopard, and I finished it on the tube this morning. It’s actually quite a short book, though densely written book, so it’s not light reading. But it’s covers a fascinating period of Italian history of which I knew nothing of course. That seems too familiar a phrase to me at the moment. I obviously don’t study nearly enough history. Well worth reading.
\nSo I shall now dust off my video – which does indeed seem to be rare since this film is unavailable on video or DVD (apart from in Italy) – and watch what is also supposed to be a masterpiece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some years back, back when foreign language films were shown on terrestrial television, there were a couple of series I used to watch religiously. One was Moving Pictures presented by Howard Schuman, and the other was Moviedrome, presented originally by Alex Cox. Now I can’t remember which of these two fine shows it was I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}