Michael Wood

There​ is a difference between being slow and being sluggish, although it’s not easy to define. Perhaps we’re sluggish if we’re failing to make progress. If we’re slow, there may not be any progress to make. In a slow movie, we can pay attention to the scenery, the outfits, the accents and think about what’s in the corner of the frame. We can remember there...

‘How often in my life have I said those words, and yet?’

John Banville, Shroud

‘I had jumped​ ,’ Conrad’s Jim says of his abandonment of his ship, adding a moment later: ‘It seems.’ Marlow, the narrator of the novel who is listening to Jim’s story, says: ‘Looks like it.’ This is one of many instances where Marlow’s...

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s​  Leviathan begins and ends as a harsh parable of the isolated individual’s losing battle against a corrupt, tentacular system. The director himself, in a press release, invites us to look to Hobbes for the meaning of the title. We have swapped our freedom for the security provided by a sovereign state – in this case an illusory exchange. But...

Monsieur Hulot​ , with his manic politeness and his endless, baffled curiosity, loped into movies in 1953 in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. He became instantly familiar, although there was a lot we didn’t know about him, like his first name or where he lived, or how he paid for his smart jackets and too short trousers. He bowed a lot and lifted his hat, he walked like a kangaroo...

There’s​ a French translation of Anna Karenina that offers an interesting version of the novel’s first sentence. ‘Tous les bonheurs se ressemblent,’ it says, ‘mais chaque infortune a sa physionomie particulière.’ All happinesses are alike but every unhappiness has its own features. The more usual translation includes the idea of the family, as in:...