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At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Riefenstahl’, 5 June 2025

... books, spreads of photos, scatterings of manuscripts. At one point a glamorous photo of the young Riefenstahl morphs into one of her when she is slightly older, followed by another in which she is older still, until we find we have seen a whole life in a set of faces. Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101. Horst Kettner, her partner of many ...

Gaol Fever

David Saunders-Wilson, 24 July 1986

Prisons and the Process of Justice 
by Andrew Rutherford.
Oxford, 217 pp., £5.95, June 1986, 0 19 281932 1
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Growing out of Crime: Society and Young People in Trouble 
by Andrew Rutherford.
Penguin, 189 pp., £3.95, January 1986, 0 14 022383 5
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... as villains. The star of London Weekend Television’s new Once a thief? is 22-year-old Michael Baillie, who began his criminal career as a burglar at the age of eight, and served his first borstal sentence at the age of 15. According to the Sunday Times, he originally wanted to play football for Aston Villa, but now he’s thinking of taking acting ...

Who’s sorry now?

Andrew O’Hagan: Michael Finkel gets lucky, 2 June 2005

True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa 
by Michael Finkel.
Chatto, 312 pp., £15.99, May 2005, 0 7011 7688 1
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Burning Down My Master’s House 
by Jayson Blair.
New Millennium, 288 pp., $24.95, March 2004, 9781932407266
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The Journalist and the Murderer 
by Janet Malcolm.
Granta, 163 pp., £8.99, January 2004, 1 86207 637 5
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... Journalistic ethos was overstrained in Cooke’s case, for her infant addict didn’t exist. The young journalist got caught, the paper was humiliated, but the only element in the tale that was brand new was the level of mea culpa that seemed to invigorate all the participants. In recent times, this level of regret has become somewhat operatic, and this ...

The Doctrine of Unripe Time

Ferdinand Mount: The Fifties, 16 November 2006

Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties 
by Peter Hennessy.
Allen Lane, 740 pp., £30, October 2006, 0 7139 9571 8
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... Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So Good. Of the new milk bars, for ...

Reconstructions

Michael Irwin, 19 February 1981

Kepler 
by John Banville.
Secker, 192 pp., £5.95, January 1981, 0 436 03264 3
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The Daughter 
by Judith Chernaik.
London Magazine Editions, 216 pp., £5.50, January 1981, 9780060107574
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We always treat women too well 
by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright.
Calder, 174 pp., £8.95, January 1981, 0 7145 3687 3
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... despise. When she finds out that Aveling, whose wife has by now died, has secretly married a young actress, she obtains poison from a chemist with his connivance and kills herself. This is a novel of unobtrusive skill, a shrewd imaginative reconstruction. Judith Chernaik deploys a variety of narrative techniques but assimilates them almost unnoticeably ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Skyfall’, 22 November 2012

Skyfall 
directed by Sam Mendes.
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... of Craig being funny brings to mind the monster doing ‘Putting on the Ritz’ in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, and he isn’t funny in Skyfall. But he does make a grim gag now and again – returning from his supposed grave he says he has been ‘enjoying death’ – he is less righteous, he is damaged, and he thinks. He is – what do you call ...

Life on the Town

Michael Wood, 22 May 1997

The Farewell Symphony 
by Edmund White.
Chatto, 504 pp., £16.99, May 1997, 0 7011 3621 9
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... The narrator looks at a photo left there, and thinks it may represent ‘one of the other dead young men’. A few pages later, recalling his seemingly interminable early sexual adventures, he says: ‘I suppose most of them are dead now, all those young bodies I touched and undressed and tucked in when they fell ...

Back to the future

Julian Symons, 10 September 1992

The Children of Men 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 239 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 571 16741 1
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A Philosophical Investigation 
by Philip Kerr.
Chatto, 336 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 7011 4553 6
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Spoilt 
by Georgina Hammick.
Chatto, 212 pp., £13.99, August 1992, 0 7011 4133 6
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The Death of the Author 
by Gilbert Adair.
Heinemann, 135 pp., £13.99, August 1992, 0 434 00623 8
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Jerusalem Commands 
by Michael Moorcock.
Cape, 577 pp., £15.99, July 1992, 0 224 03074 4
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... of her fellow detectives, who fail to recognise that the victim ‘had once been a beautiful young woman with her whole future in front of her’. But where else would her future be? Another minor technical innovation has seen the development in 2013 of soundless gas guns (one used by our killer), about which Jake is oddly ignorant. With the aid of an ...

His Greatest Pretend

Dinah Birch: The man behind Pan, 1 September 2005

Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J.M. Barrie 
by Lisa Chaney.
Hutchinson, 402 pp., £20, June 2005, 0 09 179539 7
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... to his boy. ‘Dick!’ ‘I have come to sit with you for a bit, father.’ (It is the gay, young, careless voice.) Dick turns out to be a sensible and good-humoured phantom, recommending brisk activity as a remedy for grief. He advises his father to take up painting again – ‘your picture of those three Graces’ – and not give up his ...

Blimey

Gillian Darley: James Stirling, 7 September 2000

Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling 
by Mark Girouard.
Pimlico, 323 pp., £14, March 2000, 9780712664226
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... out of which the building had triumphantly emerged showed the inevitable limitations of a young architect, leaving his drawing board and sketchbook for reality. It was Frank Newby, a superb (and generous) engineer, who made the untried concept of the lavishly glazed building actually work; it was the ...

Hand and Mind

Michael Baxandall, 17 March 1983

Dürer: His Art and Life 
by Fedja Anzelewsky, translated by Heide Grieve.
Gordon Fraser, 273 pp., £50, November 1982, 0 86092 068 2
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Dürer: Paintings, Prints, Drawings 
by Peter Strieder, translated by Nancy Gordon and Walter Strauss.
Muller, 400 pp., £35, September 1982, 0 584 95038 1
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... recommending simple exposition of Christian doctrine: I remember Dürer saying that when he was young he liked elaborate and very variegated pictures and that he much enjoyed looking at these qualities in his own pictures. Later, when older, he began to contemplate Nature ... and realised simplicity was the highest beauty of art. 4. Letter of 1555 ...

Ruthless Enthusiasms

Michael Ignatieff, 15 July 1982

The Brixton Disorders: Report of an Inquiry by the Rt Hon. the Lord Scarman 
HMSO, 168 pp., £8, November 1981, 0 10 184270 8Show More
Punishment, Danger and Stigma: The Morality of Criminal Justice 
by Nigel Walker.
Blackwell, 206 pp., £9.95, August 1980, 0 631 12542 6
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Punishment: A Philosophical and Criminological Inquiry 
by Philip Bean.
Martin Robertson, 215 pp., £12.50, August 1981, 0 85520 391 9
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Dangerousness and Criminal Justice 
by Jean Floud and Warren Young.
Heinemann, 228 pp., £14.50, October 1981, 0 435 82307 8
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The Abuse of Power: Civil Liberties in the United Kingdom 
by Patricia Hewitt.
Martin Robertson, 295 pp., £15, December 1981, 0 85520 380 3
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... rather than the beneficiaries of social change, by the working class rather than the thrusting young professionals. Yet in this economic twilight, not even the fortunate can afford to be sanguine about the future of civility in public places. If anxiety about crime is a displaced expression of a more general historical pessimism about the future of civic ...

Round up the usual perverts

Michael Wood: ‘L.A. Confidential’, 1 January 1998

L.A. Confidential 
directed by Curtis Hanson.
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... they have been beaten up? One of Fleur de Lys’s specialities is plastic surgery which converts young women into copies of contemporary actresses, Lana Turner, Veronica Lake and others, so that the clients can screw celebrity simulacra. What the film gives us is better than that: an appearance which is the reality. Kim Basinger looks just like Kim ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Jojo Rabbit’ and ‘A Hidden Life’, 5 March 2020

... in Jojo Rabbit is a strangely theoretical thing. When Johannes, still an eager young Nazi, begins a fraught friendship with the Jewish girl his mother is hiding, he asks her to draw for him the place where Jews live. She draws a picture of his head, and writes the word Dummkopf underneath. She is right. As Sartre said long ago, the Jews of ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Bette Davis, 12 August 2021

... to. She decides to punish him by embarrassing him. She will wear a red dress to a ball where all young ladies are supposed to wear white. Dillard, stubborn in his way, takes her to the ball, forces her stay longer than she wants to and to dance emphatically round the floor with him, making them the only persons still moving in a shocked staring crowd. Then ...

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