I dunno, between 'Letters From Iwo Jima', 'Unforgiven', and 'Million Dollar Baby' you could make a strong case for his being a great artist.

Well, the whole 'Million Dollar Baby' was a story by FX Toole, and that came straight from the book… so Eastwood's hardly to blame for that.

The Petticoat Affair is too insane for words. The almost total rebuilding of the cabinet and the fact that it swallowed up the whole first year of the presidency still sounds weird a hundred and fifty years after the fact. A great idea for a miniseries, especially since Jackson can't use his powerful personality and…

If that fight had gone all the way up to the supreme court it could have gone either way. Everything post nullification is on pretty shaky ground unless explicitly stated in the constitution.

Jackson and the Trail of Tears wouldn't be all that interesting, the region in question was heavily for it and he was so popular that with the exception of the courts his power was almost unchallenged.

As dumb as Smallville is at times I still consider it the definitive Superman. Everyone knows the origins story, but watching Clarke struggle with his heritage and his upbringing drove home what makes Superman great. It isn't his invincibility or heat vision or being the last son of Krypton, it's having all of this…

Sounds like the next le Carre book!

To be fair to the Nazi rocket scientists, many were only card carrying Nazis because NOT being one could quite literally be a death sentence.

On my Sports Select ticket I will occasionally put down a tie (less than three points difference) but even I was shocked to see an actual tie. It's unheard of.

It might not be their top work, but it follows so close to the book that they're a mere piece of the formula.

I thought they kind of implied that Blackbriar wasn't a retcon, just somewhere they could hide money and do whatever the hell they wanted to do.

My personal theory is that Bush is going to end up looking a lot like Grant as time goes on. A well meaning president who surrounded himself with corrupt, ambitious men who devoured his presidency.

'The Nice Guys' was a slightly less good 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang'. But I still thought it was a great romp.

It isn't shallow at all. What a person owns speaks volumes about them, I have hundreds of history books that I'm quite proud of having read, but my lady friend pointed and asked why I owned the first fifty Deathlands books. I had no answer other than guns, mutants and girls. They don't really fit the theme of what…

Wasn't the big thing time? They needed what the planet offered, but just living on it wouldn't have given it to them fast enough so they were prepared to blow it up.

I was really rooting for Jeb, his sanity amidst the complete anarchy of the early primaries was a nice taste of normalcy there.

Gore had the charisma of a piece of a week old piece of toast, if you can find some of his old stuff on youtube he's pretty painful to watch, his image has been totally rehabilitated this last decade.

My feeling is that it goes significantly further back than eight years. I think he's alluding to the days of America being a lot more involved in manufacturing where blue collar labour could (seemingly) get you a lot further ahead than it can today. But I'm a Canadian and America post-Nixon always kind of baffles me.

My brother and I listened to 'Clear and Present Danger' on audiobook while on a roadtrip and we were yelling at the stereo by the end because the antagonist was making some blindingly bad decisions simply because he was bad, not because they were in character or made narrative sense. It was frustrating as hell to…

The Night Manager was a superb book even with the lack of Cold War going ons, I'd also throw in 'The Tailor of Panama' as excellent. I'm a fan of all of his books so I'm biased, but those two struck me as very good reads.