Igenlode Wordsmith > Recent Status Updates

It turns out the allusion to Strizhonova was nothing to do with Musketeer hairstyles, but simply the fact that Oleg Strizhonov played Athos in Smekhov's previous film of "20 Years After".
It seems odd that in his introduction of Igor Starygin he never mentions that it was not only not the first time they had worked together, but not the first time they had acted together *in Dumas* - Starygin was Raoul to his Aramis!

Why on earth do the notes gloss "margents" (margins), yet not "purfling" ("Here in green meadows sits eternal May, purfling the margents")?
Apparently it refers to elaborate border patterning (according to the OED) - but surely the editor can't assume that his readers are familiar with purfled margins! (Even my vocabulary doesn't encompass that one...)

"Fair daffodils, we weep to see you haste away so soon", "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" - I hadn't realised these famous (and parodied by an earlier generation) 'quotes' were also Herrick!

In chapter 81, Aramis says that today is the 9th [of March] and that the time for their rendezvous with d'Artagnan and Porthos expires the following day.
In chapter 82, it is now the following day, and Aramis says that this is the 8th...!

Oops - I dozed off in the bath, and got water all along the spine of this...

I didn't realise that Herrick wrote Cherry-ripe!
I was just thinking that a lot of his lyrics are reminiscent of madrigals...

I suspect that Athos' remark about Planchet acquiring the knack of a witty response due to spending years "brushing the hats" of d'Artagnan is a pun that I'm missing out on...

I didn't realise George Harrison was a Burt Lancaster fan ;-)

"The paradox of being George... unprecedented, ludicrously, suffocatingly famous while at the same time undervalued, overlooked and struggling for recognition"

The pure hell of trying to shoot the sequels as 'commercial' films in the 1990s compared to the state-funded production (however low-budget) they had been used to :-(
Sponsors, racketeering, endorsements, co-production, constant negotiation with the 'generous and hand-shaking' manufacturers from Budapest or Berlin... the costumes made in Moscow were all stolen in Tallin, and had to be sewn again in the hotel.

I'm still puzzled by the massive differences between the French and English online texts (the latter being apparently not only abridged but from time to time having extra elements added in...)

Unexpected appearance of Vysotsky as a family friend!

He describes the film as a cross between a musical and a Western, where instead of singing cowboys there were singing musketeers ;-)

(The phrase "s vesternom" - "with a Western" - had me puzzled for some time as I had assumed it was a piece of Russian vocabulary! )

I had forgotten how brutal the books in this series can be - there is some ugly past history referred to, but that was years ago for me now as well as for the characters...

I'm assuming these dramatic offscreen events are a tie in with some of the author's other books...

I'm not convinced that Simon is actually dead...
Still don't like Morgan much :-(

A 'barbarian' named 'Kevin'? Seriously?

I didn't see that final twist coming (although ironically it's a twist for the characters but not the reader, as we know the truth but Simon has no means of guessing it...)