Michael Wood

Michael Wood is an emeritus professor at Princeton. He has written books on Yeats, Nabokov, Stendhal, Hitchcock and Empson, among other things.

At the Movies: ‘28 Years Later’

Michael Wood, 24 July 2025

The events​ of Danny Boyle’s new film, 28 Years Later, are not too far away. It’s set in the near future, but the prologue takes us back to 2002, which is when Boyle’s earlier film 28 Days Later was released. (There is also 28 Weeks Later, the 2007 sequel directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, but this seems to borrow a piece of the storyline without becoming part of the...

At the Movies: ‘Riefenstahl’

Michael Wood, 5 June 2025

Luis Buñuel​ worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 1939 and 1941. His job was to select documentary films to be sent to Latin America, but he also, more notoriously, edited Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) with a view to turning its effect on its head. Heroic grandeur would become petty parading. The odds of success must have seemed good. Buñuel...

At the Movies: ‘La Haine’

Michael Wood, 8 May 2025

Mathieu Kassovitz’s​ film La Haine, regarded as a classic in many circles, is currently being shown in UK cinemas to mark the thirtieth anniversary of its release. ‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in...

Clean Machine: On Dino Buzzati

Michael Wood, 17 April 2025

Dino Buzzati​’s novel The Singularity was published in Italian in 1960 but set in 1972. Just a small leap into the future, but far enough for the second date to be that of Buzzati’s death. A coincidence, of course, but one that hints at meaning or design, as coincidences often do. We could say that life, for once, was mildly imitating his fiction, visiting his world of weirdly...

At the Movies: ‘Mickey 17’

Michael Wood, 3 April 2025

Edward Ashton’s​ novel Mickey7 (2022) has an opening line that’s hard to beat: ‘This is gonna be my stupidest death ever.’ The speaker is lying in an ice-encrusted cave which he fell into as he walked through a rocky landscape. But what about his other deaths? Bong Joon-ho doesn’t quite match this announcement in Mickey 17, his dizzying movie version of the...

Pirouette on a Sixpence: Untranslatables

Christopher Prendergast, 10 September 2015

On​ the face of it a Dictionary of Untranslatables looks like a contradiction in terms, either self-imploding from the word go, or, if pursued, headed fast down a cul-de-sac in which it is...

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It took a very special kind of invention to get an awareness of the ‘erratic truth of death’s timing’ into a medium of mass entertainment.

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I told you so! oracles

James Davidson, 2 December 2004

I don’t believe in astrology, but I also know that not believing in astrology is a typically Taurean trait. When I first caught a bright young friend browsing in the astrology section of a...

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And That Rug! images of Shakespeare

Michael Dobson, 6 November 2003

Above the entrance to the saloon bar there is a picture of Shakespeare on the swinging sign. It is the same picture of Shakespeare that I remember from my schooldays, when I frowned over Timon of...

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Unspeakability

John Lanchester, 6 October 1994

Musing over Don Juan, Byron asked his banker and agent Douglas Kinnaird a rhetorical question: ‘Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a...

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