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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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... can’t have written this novel, or any novel we could read, because he’s only fictional, as Woody Allen would say, and fictional authors have even more trouble finding real publishers than flesh-and-bones authors do. But then imagining the Master has written the novel fictionalises us, pulls us into his world rather than puts him in ours. In this ...

What’s your dust worth?

Steven Shapin: Corpses, 14 April 2011

After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver 
by Norman Cantor.
Georgetown, 372 pp., £18.75, December 2010, 978 1 58901 695 8
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... much part of life. If you need complete secularism, it’s not Wittgenstein you should go to but Woody Allen: ‘I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it ...

Just one of those ends

Michael Wood: Apocalypse Regained, 13 December 2001

Apocalypse Now Redux 
directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
August 2001
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Marlon Brando 
by Patricia Bosworth.
Weidenfeld, 216 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 297 84284 6
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... Peter Cowie tells us, Brando reads the whole poem. This is a great, time-twisting gag, worthy of Woody Allen. A resurrected fictional character, cued by a reference to himself in his earlier incarnation, picks up and reads a work by a real-life poet. Coppola now seems to have invented Conrad, Kurtz and Eliot, but the only real agent here is ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2016, 5 January 2017

... at the Evening Standard awards lunch. I was struck by how stylish and Ivy League he was (like Woody Allen, who wore similarly dapper outfits then), slim and neat in a look I always fancied. More striking was that Albee was there in company with his male partner, which was still a bold step in 1972 and only the second time I had come across such an ...

Who had the most fun?

David Bromwich: The Marx Brothers, 10 May 2001

Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 480 pp., £7.99, April 2001, 0 14 029426 0
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The Essential Groucho 
by Groucho Marx, edited by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 254 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 14 029425 2
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... rediscovered not only by the Dadaist fringe of the 1960s antiwar movement but by Dick Cavett, Woody Allen and other literate and nostalgic entertainers. He appeared now as the honoured guest in public celebrations and televised specials which showed his energy waning but his mischief fundamentally unchanged. He presided over the rehearsals of ...

They’re just not ready

Neal Ascherson: Gorbachev Betrayed, 7 January 2010

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment 
by Stephen Kotkin, with Jan Gross.
Modern Library, 240 pp., $24, October 2009, 978 0 679 64276 3
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Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 
by Victor Sebestyen.
Weidenfeld, 451 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 0 297 85223 0
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There Is No Freedom without Bread: 1989 and the Civil War that Brought Down Communism 
by Constantine Pleshakov.
Farrar, Straus, 289 pp., $26, November 2009, 978 0 374 28902 7
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1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe 
by Mary Elise Sarotte.
Princeton, 321 pp., £20.95, November 2009, 978 0 691 14306 4
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... He was dismayed by the enthusiasm of rebels like the bearded János Kis, who reminded him of a Woody Allen character: ‘They’re just not ready.’ His team shared his fear that the Cold War might end in chaos and local conflicts. At the start of the year, Bush had sent Henry Kissinger (codenamed ‘Kitty’) to Moscow on a secret mission to make ...

That Wooden Leg

Michael Wood: Conversations with Don Luis, 7 September 2000

An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel 
translated by Garrett White.
California, 266 pp., £17.50, April 2000, 0 520 20840 4
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... gaiety.Buñuel likes some contemporary directors, but not many. American films, he says. Woody Allen. Stanley Kubrick. ‘That film with those shots of the man’s eye.’ ‘A Clockwork Orange?’ ‘That’s the one.’ Nice thought, coming from the man whose film career began with the image of an eye slashed by a razor. Buñuel tells me a ...

Puzzled Puss

John Lahr: Buster Keaton’s Star Turn, 19 January 2023

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life 
by James Curtis.
Knopf, 810 pp., £30, February 2022, 978 0 385 35421 9
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... on screen, only to be thrown out of the story and back into the stalls by the screen villain. (Woody Allen appropriated the conceit in both The Purple Rose of Cairo and his short story ‘The Kugelmass Episode’, where the narrator, a professor of literature, finds himself trapped with Madame Bovary and visible to the novel’s readers.) Keaton’s ...

Toots, they owned you

John Lahr: My Hollywood Fling, 15 June 2023

Hollywood: The Oral History 
edited by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson.
Faber, 739 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 0 571 36694 1
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... Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our nomination. My trajectory seemed as straight and clear as ...

You have to take it

Joanne O’Leary: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Style, 17 November 2022

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick 
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 400 pp., £25, January, 978 1 324 00552 0
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The Uncollected Essays 
by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 304 pp., £15.99, May, 978 1 68137 623 3
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... was ending. When they first got together, mutual friends had been quick to sound the alarm. Allen Tate warned Hardwick that ‘Cal is dangerous. There are definite homicidal implications in his world, particularly toward women and children … You must not let him in your apartment.’ He had twice broken the nose of his first wife, Jean Stafford, and ...

When the beam of light has gone

Peter Wollen: Godard Turns Over, 17 September 1998

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard 
by Wheeler Winston Dixon.
SUNY, 290 pp., £17.99, March 1997, 0 7914 3285 8
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Speaking about Godard 
by Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki.
New York, 256 pp., $55, July 1998, 0 8147 8066 0
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... the set and Godard tore up the script, beginning again with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. Woody Allen did a walk-on as Mr Alien and Godard himself appeared as Professor Pluggy. Mailer’s vision of the film as a gangster movie in the tradition of The Godfather was systematically thrown to the winds. 7. Stabilisation. In the most recent phase of ...

I only want the OM

Christopher Tayler: Somerset Maugham, 1 September 2005

Somerset Maugham: A Life 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Vintage, 411 pp., £12, April 2005, 1 4000 3052 8
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... that ‘a novelist must arrange the facts to entertain his readers.’ (In one of his parodies, Woody Allen has Maugham advising: ‘At the end of an interrogatory sentence, place a question mark. You’d be surprised how effective it can be.’) Waugh described him as a master of ‘creating the appetite for information . . . withholding it until ...

Into the Eisenshpritz

Elif Batuman: Superheroes, 10 April 2008

Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories 
by Will Eisner.
Norton, 493 pp., £18.99, November 2007, 978 0 393 06107 9
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Epileptic 
by David B..
Cape, 368 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 0 224 07920 4
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Shortcomings 
by Adrian Tomine.
Faber, 108 pp., £12.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23329 8
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Misery Loves Comedy 
by Ivan Brunetti.
Fantagraphics, 172 pp., £15.99, April 2007, 978 1 56097 792 6
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... or something?’ Alice is happy to feel her life intersecting with the set of a ‘nostalgic’ Woody Allen movie, because the American Jewish narrative offers a chance to fit her own idiosyncratic and often uncomfortable personal experience into an already meaningful story – one which, moreover, has a built-in happy ending. From the perspective of ...

The Unstoppable Upward

James Wolcott: ‘The Life of Saul Bellow’, 24 January 2019

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 864 pp., £35, November 2018, 978 0 224 10188 2
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... combining the pleasure of seduction with the purr of hearing his own voice. The prototype of a Woody Allen protagonist, he sought to furnish his protégées’ minds, groom their tastes, show them the world. (Bellow was suavely incorporated into the celebrity cast of Allen’s 1983 biopic spoof Zelig.) Leader’s ...

Short Cuts

J. Hoberman: The CIA’s Animal Farm, 5 July 2007

... and the IRD the only interested parties: according to Leab, both the US Army and the producers of Woody Woodpecker cartoons also made inquiries as to the availability of Animal Farm’s film rights. The trade press reported that de Rochemont financed Animal Farm with the frozen British box-office receipts from his racial ‘passing’ drama Lost ...

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