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At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Blue Jasmine’, 24 October 2013

Blue Jasmine 
directed by Woody Allen.
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... would be a fine comic set-piece), seems to have got exceptionally lucky. She meets a handsome young diplomat with a vast new house in Marin County, tells him a pack of lies about herself – her late husband was a surgeon, they had no children, she is a practised interior designer – and is on her way to marrying him when a chance encounter with ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Le Mépris’, 21 January 2016

Le Mépris 
directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
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... respectively. The film opens with an intimate introduction to what isn’t quite the cinema. A young woman walks towards us, reading some notes she holds in her hand. She is accompanied by a film crew. The camera is on tracks leading down the right-hand side of the screen from back to front. The cameraman sits behind it, and the camera, at first seen ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Babel’, 25 January 2007

Babel 
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.
September 2006
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... to bully Mexicans. The amplified situation is delicately pictured at the end of the film when a young policeman opens a note Chieko has written to him, indicating that he is not to read it in her presence. We glimpse the text, but can’t read it because we don’t see it for long enough or from the right angle – and a lot of us can’t read Japanese ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: David Lean, 3 July 2008

... period films I hadn’t seen, an elegant and slow movie about the Italian romance of a no longer young American woman played by Katharine Hepburn. It was shot entirely on location in Venice, and Rossano Brazzi as the love interest comes a distinctly poor second to the city. Lean and H.E. Bates had taken an Arthur Laurents play and reworked it thoroughly ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Some Like It Hot’, 22 November 2018

... role in Little Caesar, although I did, like most people, pick up the reference when Raft asks young Robinson where he got the ‘cheap trick’ of tossing a coin while he is talking. He got it from Raft himself, who had made the habit his trademark long ago in Scarface. Amid such allusions – and indeed the whole show of organised crime as a sort of ...

Imbued … with Exigence

Christopher Tayler: Rachel Cusk, 22 September 2005

In the Fold 
by Rachel Cusk.
Faber, 224 pp., £10.99, September 2005, 0 571 22813 5
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... him, escape from the current crisis required a crime larger than he was able to commit.’ A young woman decides that feminists can wear make-up: ‘She created herself daily, and did not want to know – or others to know, for that matter – what murky truths lay behind her finery. That by disguising these smaller truths she was merely uncovering ...

After-Lives

John Sutherland, 5 November 1992

Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography 
by Ian Hamilton.
Hutchinson, 344 pp., £18.99, October 1992, 0 09 174263 3
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Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy 
by Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 273 pp., £27.50, June 1992, 0 19 811276 9
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The Last Laugh 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 131 pp., £10.99, December 1991, 0 7011 4583 8
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Trollope 
by Victoria Glendinning.
Hutchinson, 551 pp., £20, September 1992, 0 09 173896 2
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... keepers of the flame, while pocketing the revenue for the estate, have no intention of satisfying. Michael Millgate has – quite fortuitously – written a book on exactly the same subject as Ian Hamilton, using the same case-study method. Whereas Hamilton burned his fingers trying to steal Salinger’s flame, Millgate – Hardy’s biographer and the editor ...

Azure Puddles

John Bayley, 21 May 1987

Compton Mackenzie: A Life 
by Andro Linklater.
Chatto, 384 pp., £14.95, May 1987, 0 7011 2583 7
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... father. On Capri he was to see himself as Byron, D.H. Lawrence as Shelley and Francis Brett Young as a more retiring kind of Keats. And Lawrence was fascinated by him, found him sympathetic and good company, and made him the model in his story called ‘The man who loved islands’. The story could just as well be about Lawrence himself, and shows the ...

Injury Time

Robert Taubman, 2 July 1981

Gorky Park 
by Martin Cruz Smith.
Collins, 365 pp., £6.95, May 1981, 0 00 222278 7
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The Turn-Around 
by Vladimir Volkoff, translated by Alan Sheridan.
Bodley Head, 411 pp., £6.95, April 1981, 0 370 30323 7
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Thus was Adonis murdered 
by Sarah Caudwell.
Collins, 246 pp., £5.95, March 1981, 0 00 231854 7
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A Splash of Red 
by Antonia Fraser.
Weidenfeld, 229 pp., £5.95, May 1981, 0 297 77937 0
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... plotting between Intelligence agencies looks real, and all the rest looks like fantasy. Like the young Michael Innes, Sarah Caudwell both respects and flouts the conventions of the detective story. Thus was Adonis murdered is a very modern novel using the archaic epistolary method of Clarissa: aptly enough, because it has as much to do with seduction as ...

Diary

Michael Taussig: In Colombia, 5 October 2006

... desperate need for health services, not least to deal with sexually transmitted illness among the young and poor, there is no shortage of breast implants, liposuction and hymen restoration costing upwards of US $400, in a society where the basic wage is around $160 a month. Of course, as with back-alley abortions, there are aesthetic surgeons who work for as ...

The Miners’ Strike

Michael Stewart, 6 September 1984

... violence – brought into every home by television – on the picket-lines, where hordes of tough young miners and uniformed policemen sway and grapple in physical combat like Medieval armies. There is the uneasiness about the accountability of the Police. There are the guerrilla raids at night, presumably by striking miners, which leave a trail of damage and ...

Bitten by a Snake

Michael Wood: Waiting for Valéry, 21 May 2020

The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry 
translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody.
Farrar, Straus, 352 pp., £32, April, 978 0 374 29848 7
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... among others, Helen of Troy, Narcissus, the Pythia, the serpent from Genesis, an angel and the young Parque herself. James Lawler speaks of the ‘opera’ that is playing in La Jeune Parque, and this is a good metaphor for the tone and population of the other poems too. There are singers, who take on roles, a composer and a conductor, all doing their own ...

We offered them their chance

Michael Wood: Henry James and the Great War, 2 June 2005

The Ivory Tower 
by Henry James.
NYRB, 266 pp., £8.99, July 2004, 1 59017 078 4
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... The story opens on a picture of a very large young lady, ‘a truly massive young person’, crossing from one house to another in Newport, Rhode Island, site of ‘florid’ villas and other structures ‘smothered in senseless architectural ornament’. On the verandah of the second house she finds her father, an inordinately rich man, sourly awaiting the death of his former partner, a slightly less rich man ...

Whose Body?

Charles Glass: ‘Operation Mincemeat’, 22 July 2010

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War Two 
by Ben Macintyre.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 0 7475 9868 8
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... The idea of using a corpse to plant false clues lodged itself in the imagination of a young naval intelligence officer, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming. In the first month of the war, Fleming and his chief at naval intelligence, Admiral Godfrey, compiled a list of possible deceptions they called the ‘Trout Memo’. Some of its playful ruses ...

Mothers

Michael Church, 18 April 1985

Gypsy and Me: At Home and on the Road with Gypsy Rose Lee 
by Erik Lee Preminger.
Deutsch, 277 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 233 97736 8
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George Thomas, Mr Speaker: The Memoirs of Viscount Tonypandy 
Century, 242 pp., £9.95, February 1985, 0 7126 0706 4Show More
Toff down Pit 
by Kit Fraser.
Quartet, 129 pp., £8.95, January 1985, 0 7043 2513 6
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Menlove: The Life of John Menlove Edwards 
by Jim Perrin.
Gollancz, 347 pp., £14.95, February 1985, 0 575 03571 4
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... Has he betrayed his office by breaking confidence and revealing the backstage manoeuvres of Michael Foot and others? Yes, but the revelations are of interest in that they indicate a secret system. Whether they are accurate is another question, of more interest to Mr Foot and his friends than it is to the rest of us. The most amusing revelation of all ...

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