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Going Straight

Neal Ascherson, 17 March 1983

After Long Silence 
by Michael Straight.
Collins, 351 pp., £11.95, March 1983, 0 00 217001 9
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A Matter of Trust: MI5 1945-72 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 196 pp., £8.95, December 1982, 0 297 78253 3
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... malevolent, piteous or merely inaccurate, ought to be wound up after the publication of Michael Straight’s contribution. Very possibly, Anthony Blunt will one day write such a book himself. But the names have almost all been named, the questions of motive worn smooth, the titles and pensions (some of them) stripped like epaulettes, the spell in ...

The Horror of Money

Michael Wood, 8 December 1988

The Pink and the Green 
by Stendhal, translated by Richard Howard.
Hamish Hamilton, 148 pp., £10.95, July 1988, 0 241 12289 9
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Stendhal’s Violin: A Novelist and his Reader 
by Roger Pearson.
Oxford, 294 pp., £30, February 1988, 0 19 815851 3
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... money. Her many suitors, rapidly attracted by news of her fortune, ‘disgust’ her: ‘all these young men gathered here with the base motive of gaining the millions of my dowry, and to that end affecting all the appearances of a tender sentiment, truly horrify me ...’ As she herself says, she can’t quite account ‘for the nature and the degree’ of ...

What Henry didn’t do

Michael Wood: ‘The Master’, 18 March 2004

The Master 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 360 pp., £15.99, March 2004, 0 330 48565 2
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... the waste and desolation it leaves in a life. In ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, a man tells a young woman that he believes he has a special destiny, that he is ‘being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible’, the spring of a tiger in the jungle. The man refuses all other experiences, including that of allowing himself to ...

Ramadhin and Valentine

J.R. Pole, 13 October 1988

A History of West Indies Cricket 
by Michael Manley.
Deutsch, 575 pp., £17.95, May 1988, 0 233 98259 0
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Sobers: Twenty Years at the Top 
by Garfield Sobers and Brian Scovell.
Macmillan, 204 pp., £11.95, June 1988, 0 333 37267 0
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... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...

Sympathy for the Devil

Michael Wood, 16 October 1997

The Master and Margarita 
by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor.
Picador, 367 pp., £20, August 1997, 0 330 35133 8
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The Master and Margarita 
by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Penguin, 412 pp., £7.99, May 1997, 0 14 118014 5
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... as being ‘unaccustomed to unusual happenings’. When one of the devil’s assistants says to a young woman that he has been sent to see her ‘regarding a certain small matter’, she understands him immediately, albeit wrongly. Obviously he has come to arrest her. What a relief when she learns that he hasn’t; better the devil than the secret police. Not ...

Cleveland

Michael Mason, 10 November 1988

Report of the Inquiry into Child Abuse in Cleveland 1987 
by Elizabeth Butler-Sloss.
HMSO, 336 pp., £14.50, July 1988, 0 10 104122 5
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When Salem came to the Boro 
by Stuart Bell.
Pan, 355 pp., £3.99, July 1988, 0 330 30503 4
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The Last Taboo 
by Gay Search.
Penguin, 192 pp., £3.99, August 1988, 0 14 011049 6
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Unofficial Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse – The Cleveland Case 
by Beatrix Campbell.
Virago, 226 pp., £4.50, September 1988, 0 86068 634 5
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... this year, these men had repeatedly been making sexual assaults of the most extreme sort on very young members of their families, sometimes in a spirit of revolting cruelty. One man had raped his sobbing five-year-old daughter, as she was held down by her mother, and buggered his three-year-old son. The other two had indecently assaulted and buggered ...

Private Lives

Ray Monk, 22 November 1990

... taste for ‘rough trade’. The picture shows Wittgenstein walking down the street with a young man wearing a black raincoat. It was originally published in Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten, edited by Michael Nedo and Michele Ranchetti, with the caption: Wittgenstein mit dem Freund Ben Richards in ...

Athenian View

Michael Brock, 12 March 1992

Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 
by Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 383 pp., £40, September 1991, 0 19 820173 7
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... to all of the University’s High Anglicans. ‘You must believe in God,’ Jowett told the young Margot Tennant, ‘in spite of what the clergy tell you.’ The effects of Biblical criticism and scientific advances on the household of faith take a deal of disentangling. Some leading Late Victorians sought in social work the motivating force which they ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Leviathan’, 8 January 2015

Leviathan 
directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev.
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... in the sand. Is this another Leviathan? The real Leviathan, dead and wasted, a sort of memorial? A young boy goes out to sit with the skeleton when he is upset. The place is the coast of the Barents Sea, not far from Murmansk, but every scene except the last is set in summer, so the cold is not the point. Nor is there any real sense of closeness to ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Judex’, 17 July 2014

... to get into the James Bond market, also true that French mainstream cinema did all kinds of things young filmmakers didn’t like – that’s what the New Wave was about. Still, even if a homage to the past is quite different from raiding it, the near-simultaneity of the two is interesting. Judex was a silent serial Louis Feuillade had made in 1916 – after ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Fading Gigolo’, 19 June 2014

Fading Gigolo 
directed by John Turturro.
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... Murray does have to work to get other clients, and his prize is Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), a young Hasidic widow who needs to escape from her stultifying life and the eager attentions of Dovi (Liev Schreiber), a Brooklyn community safety officer with earlocks and a patrol car. Murray inventively casts Fioravante as a masseur, and the resulting intimacy ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, 6 March 2014

The Wolf of Wall Street 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
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... the normal world – but who wants to live there?’ He takes men and women he describes as ‘young, hungry and stupid’ and turns them into a howling, irresistible sales force, persuading investors to buy lousy stock the traders can dump once they have made a packet from the brief, illusory booms. DiCaprio describes the job as ‘selling garbage to ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Agnès Varda, 5 November 2009

... work to set up house inside some forgotten foyer. At one point she films a protest march, many young people carrying signs urgently calling out for change. Varda herself suddenly appears on the sidelines, a little old lady, as she calls herself, also carrying a placard. It says ‘J’ai mal partout’ – ‘I hurt everywhere.’ This phrase also has a ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Man on Wire’, 11 September 2008

Man on Wire 
directed by James Marsh.
August 2008
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... learned of them when he read a magazine during a visit to a dentist, although of course he was too young to have conceived of his exploit then, and the towers were still just a project. At an early point in the film we see a shot of what looks like Ground Zero, cranes and excavators at work in a deep hole in the earth. But it isn’t a picture of Ground ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Simpsons Movie’, 16 August 2007

The Simpsons Movie 
directed by David Silverman.
July 2007
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... back ‘in the Old Country’. ‘I forget which one exactly,’ he says. A memory flash shows a young Grampa on a boat where everyone has an Irish accent mixed with something that might be Polish. But the subtlest and funniest joke in the episode, the one that best sums up all the hypocrisy thriving then and now on the subject of immigration and therefore ...

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