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Saturday Night in Darlington

D.A.N. Jones, 1 April 1983

... split. You could see the blocks of council flats – many of which have housed the families of young dockworkers quite happily – boarded up, scorned and despised: for the young men and women have moved away. You could see older small houses, once workmen’s cottages, now extremely desirable for ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard’, 15 July 2021

... a celebrated assassin, started his career as an amateur, killing his father’s murderer. He was young at the time, and knew that his father, a church pastor, would have reminded him that vengeance was best left to the Lord. He also knew that, as he says, he didn’t want to wait that long. In the film he seems more a curser than a killer. Reynolds, as ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Enola Holmes’, 22 October 2020

... by Jack Thorne from a novel by Nancy Springer. Springer has written more than fifty books for young adults, going some way towards confirming that this category often has nothing to do with the age of the reader, and means only that the writing is better than a lot of what is apparently suited to older adults. Six of Springer’s books are about Enola ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Éric Rohmer, 18 May 2023

... by inviting us to visit a series of Paris apartments. No dialogue for quite a while, just a young woman arriving and leaving. She is carrying a satchel, seeming to have come home from work. But ‘home’ is already inhabited by a man’s clothes lying all over the place, by piles of books and folders. The woman starts to tidy up, then changes her ...

Disorderly Cities

Richard J. Evans: WW2 Town Planning, 5 December 2013

A Blessing in Disguise: War and Town Planning in Europe, 1940-45 
edited by Jörn Düwel and Niels Gutschow.
DOM, 415 pp., €98, August 2013, 978 3 86922 295 0
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... Urban planning utopias have never been popular except with political elites. Peter Willmott and Michael Young, in Family and Kinship in East London (1957), painted a dire picture of community warmth in the old East End giving way to anomie and alienation in the new towns to which bombed-out families were forced to move. In the end, the destruction of ...

Swanker

Ronald Bryden, 10 December 1987

The Life of Kenneth Tynan 
by Kathleen Tynan.
Weidenfeld, 407 pp., £16.95, September 1987, 9780297790822
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... therefore became, so to speak, theatrical squared. Their situation also made them competitive. As Michael Young was to point out in The Rise of the Meritocracy, élites based on education lack the security of the old aristocracies of land and money. To live by one’s wits is a nervous business: every younger brain, each new foot on the educational ...

Seven Poems

Michael Hofmann, 4 September 1980

... Phase I live in Berkeleyan hostility With my parents. The fridge bellows Like a young tractor. Very soon I shall Run away and join the Vatican Guard. Back Numbers Carelessly we tore our love Like soft newspapers with feet. Then stooping down, we read With interest some vintage items. Carnal Poem Birds came and pecked at a group of yellow bread crusts scattered on a low roof ...

‘I love you, defiant witch!’

Michael Newton: Charles Williams, 8 September 2016

Charles Williams: The Third Inkling 
by Grevel Lindop.
Oxford, 493 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 0 19 928415 3
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... or C.S. Lewis with Boxen, Williams invented an imaginary country; his was called Silvania. As a young man he was bookish and churchy, cursed by an aptitude for writing average verse. Lack of cash led to his leaving University College London, but he soon found a berth in the OUP offices at Amen Corner near St Paul’s. He worked there for the rest of his ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Celine Song’s ‘Past Lives’, 19 October 2023

... earlier’. Twenty-four years earlier – that is, about two seconds later – two children, Na Young and Hae Sung, climb a hill on the outskirts of Seoul. They have just left school and Na Young is crying because Hae Sung has, for once, got better marks than she did. He says she’s a psycho, which is apparently meant as ...

Opera Mundi

Michael Neve, 1 December 1983

Out of Order 
by Frank Johnson.
Robson, 256 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 86051 190 1
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Frank Johnson’s Election Year 
by Frank Johnson.
Robson, 192 pp., £6.95, October 1983, 0 86051 254 1
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Enthusiasms 
by Bernard Levin.
Cape, 264 pp., £8.95, November 1983, 0 224 02114 1
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Poem of the Year 
by Clive James.
Cape, 79 pp., £4.95, November 1983, 0 224 02961 4
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The Original Michael Frayn 
by Michael Frayn.
Salamander, 203 pp., £8.50, October 1983, 0 907540 32 5
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... the cosmic. It seems that Mr Levin’s life was changed by discovering Moby Dick. Mr Johnson, as a young man, found it ‘unintelligible’. Now of course Mr Johnson in some sense took over from Mr Levin at what one is tempted to call the late London Times. He was a little worried, following on in this line: ‘Politics was my trade, not the universe.’ No ...

Watching a black man in the shower

Michael Wood, 12 September 1991

Young Soul Rebels 
directed by Isaac Julien.
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Diary of a Young Soul Rebel 
by Isaac Julien and Colin MacCabe.
BFI, 218 pp., £10.95, September 1991, 0 85170 310 0
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... The heart of Young Soul Rebels, visually and dramatically, is a scene in an East London club, noisy, cheerful, full of glitter and bounce. Punk and soul music alternate on the disco deck; punk and soul styles are jumbled on the dance floor. Men and women, black and white, gays and straights, mix easily if loudly, having a good time ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: The Devil and Robert Bresson, 5 June 2008

Le Diable, probablement 
directed by Robert Bresson.
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... actors in Le Diable, probablement are taken from a repertoire of cliché. A cluster of disaffected young people from the 1970s act like someone’s notion of disaffected young people from the 1970s: that is, they are schematically apathetic and on their way to being hopelessly dated well before the decade is out. What ought ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Senna’, 14 July 2011

Senna 
directed by Asif Kapadia.
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... the go-karts was the British driver Terry Fullerton. No mention of Nigel Mansell or Niki Lauda or Michael Schumacher. Still less of Alain Prost. All Senna ever wanted, in this perspective, was to drive cars fast. Politics and fame were for other people; or perhaps just a cross he had to bear. He was fond of calling on God to help him, and of thanking God for ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘A Dangerous Method’, 8 March 2012

A Dangerous Method 
directed by David Cronenberg.
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... wants us to think, or just a collateral effect of the set-up. The figures, including that of the young woman, Sabina Spielrein, are historical, but this is not a historical movie. It is a fantasy about authority and desire, with symbolic names slotted in for the key roles. Or, to put that another way, it is a form of biopic that knows it’s not a biography ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Force Majeure’, ‘Clouds of Sils Maria’, 7 May 2015

Force Majeure 
directed by Ruben Östlund.
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Clouds of Sils Maria 
directed by Olivier Assayas.
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... family photographs being taken: father, mother, daughter, son together, all just as contented and young and healthy-looking as they are supposed to be. They are Swedish and on holiday in the French Alps. The static, orderly images continue: landscapes, sky, aseptic hotel that seems to be all corridors, family comfortably piled in large bed. When things move ...

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