Michael Wood

At the end​ of François Ozon’s film The Stranger, the narrator and hero makes a remarkable speech. He does the same, verbatim, in Luchino Visconti’s 1967 movie, and in Albert Camus’s novel L’Étranger, on which both films are based. But it means something different in each case and so becomes a sort of test or touchstone for the viewer or reader. A man...

Julian Barnes’s​ latest book is full of broken rules. In the second chapter we’re invited to look back at his early novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which contained, along with much else, ‘a list … of subjects which should be banned from fiction on a temporary or permanent basis’. The narrator’s list, with which Barnes himself ‘largely...

Emily Brontë’s​ novel, Wuthering Heights, ends in a graveyard where the narrator wonders ‘how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’. Emerald Fennell’s film of the same name opens with a public hanging, and we wonder if things will quieten down. Is this a connection? Not really, except that both works deal in...

Acharacter​ in Josh Safdie’s new film, Marty Supreme, says there are no second chances in this world. The remark is meant to sound tough and true, if a little worn out. In fact, although the character may be right about many places in reality, he couldn’t be more wrong about the world of this movie. Everyone has dozens of chances, and everyone screws up most of them.

Marty Supreme...

‘If only one could write! After that, perhaps one could think,’ Gaston Bachelard writes in The Flame of a Candle, published in 1961, a year before his death. He is picturing himself at his desk, waiting in vain for the ability to write to return, for the solitude of the blank page to end. There were too many times, he says, when thinking he was thinking (‘croyant...