At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘One Fine Morning’, 15 June 2023

... but we see the film as if it were already made. It’s about two people who had an affair when young and meet up again in order to fail to beget a sequel. In a very elegant invention, when Chris is lingering in what used to be Bergman’s house, she meets the actor we have seen playing the man in the as yet unmade movie. He’s just a tourist at this ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Megalopolis’, 24 October 2024

... a photograph shows Catilina in bed with an underage pop star – who turns out not to be so young after all. This material not only provides a background for the enmity between the architect-inventor and the mayor, it conjures up a world where errors and falsehood can be recognised, and where the mildly monstrous, always operatic Catilina may after all ...

Last Word

Michael Ignatieff, 3 February 1983

The Wolf-Man: Sixty Years Later 
by Karin Obholzer, translated by Michael Shaw.
Routledge, 250 pp., £12.50, November 1982, 0 7100 9354 3
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Ernest Jones: Freud’s Alter Ego 
by Vincent Brome.
Caliban, 250 pp., £12.50, January 1983, 0 904573 57 5
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... kept him alive: the infinite fascination and torment of his inner life. When Karen Obholzer, a young Austrian journalist with a special sensitivity to old men’s stories, tracked him down in his Vienna apartment, he was a debonair and melancholy old gentleman in his eighties with a slight, drooping resemblance to Harold Macmillan. Since 1919, he had lived ...

Bed-Hopping and Coup-Plotting

Michael Kulikowski: Attila and the Princess, 12 February 2009

Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire 
by Christopher Kelly.
Bodley Head, 290 pp., £17.99, September 2008, 978 0 224 07676 0
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... knot of Roman soldiers huddled together over the saddest kind of duty. A comrade-in-arms had died young, after just two years under the standards. They buried him with the honours he deserved, in his best uniform and his shining metal belt – the cingulum that was every fighting man’s pride, the sign that he was a soldier. No headstone would mark his grave ...

Beware Remembrance Sunday

Tim Parks: Graham Swift, 2 June 2011

Wish You Were Here 
by Graham Swift.
Picador, 353 pp., £18.99, June 2011, 978 0 330 53583 0
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... of storytelling in this novel has to do with the death of a dog. Three characters are involved: Michael Luxton, a taciturn dairy farmer; Jack, his elder son, aged 26; and Tom, his much younger son, approaching his 18th birthday. The old sick dog, named Luke, was originally just a farm dog, then for many years Jack’s close companion, but now more recently ...

Short Cuts

Chris Mullin: Michael Foot, 25 March 2010

... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...

Just like Mother

Theo Tait: Richard Yates, 6 February 2003

Collected Stories 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 474 pp., £17.99, January 2002, 0 413 77125 3
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Revolutionary Road 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 346 pp., £6.99, February 2001, 0 413 75710 2
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The Easter Parade 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 226 pp., £10, January 2003, 0 413 77202 0
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... limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The Easter Parade ...

Those for whom India proves too strong

Patricia Craig, 31 March 1988

Three Continents 
by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Murray, 384 pp., £11.95, October 1987, 0 7195 4433 5
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... is covered by Three Continents. We begin in America with a pair of zealous twins, Harriet and Michael Wishwell (pronounced Witchell), 19 years old, both owning and expecting a lot of inherited assets, money and property, and both avid to serve some striking cause. ‘Michael, my twin brother, and I always wanted ...

Nouvelle Vague

Anthony Quinn, 7 January 1993

The Conclave 
by Michael Bracewell.
Secker, 339 pp., £8.99, October 1992, 0 436 20020 1
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Cock & Bull 
by Will Self.
Bloomsbury, 310 pp., £9.99, October 1992, 0 7475 1274 4
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... Readers making their way through Michael Bracewell’s latest novel may gradually become aware of a small but persistent ache: it comes of the author nudging them in the ribs. There is no chance of being caught napping during the various crises and cruces of The Conclave because Bracewell signposts them all with a diligence and clarity that would not disgrace a sightseeing guide ...

Tricky Minds

Michael Wood: Dostoevsky, 5 September 2002

Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet 1871-81 
by Joseph Frank.
Princeton, 784 pp., £24.95, May 2002, 0 691 08665 6
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... to this logic, Dostoevsky’s actual punishment, in 1849, for his membership of a group of young socialists – along with his fellows he was subjected to a mock execution, led out as if to be shot, but then sent to Siberia – should have relieved the epilepsy, since its punishing role would have been superseded by the sentence of the Tsar, a second ...

Laertes has a daughter

Bee Wilson: The Redgraves, 6 June 2013

The Redgraves: A Family Epic 
by Donald Spoto.
Robson, 361 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84954 394 1
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The House of Redgrave: The Lives of a Theatrical Dynasty 
by Tim Adler.
Aurum, 336 pp., £20, July 2012, 978 1 84513 623 9
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... In the National Theatre’s inaugural season in 1963 Michael Redgrave played Claudius to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet. Apart from Olivier, the theatre’s first director, Redgrave, then aged 55, was its greatest star. Known to the public from his many film roles, and having just been named actor of the year by the Evening Standard for his Uncle Vanya at Chichester, which one critic called ‘the highest level of acting the contemporary theatre has to offer’, he was good box-office ...

Rubbing Up

Michael Church, 7 June 1984

Growing Up 
by Russell Baker.
Sidgwick, 278 pp., £9.95, February 1984, 0 283 99056 2
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Scouse Mouse, or I never got over it: An Autobiography 
by George Melly.
Weidenfeld, 208 pp., £8.95, March 1984, 0 297 78277 0
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The Haunted Mind 
by Hallam Tennyson.
Deutsch, 238 pp., £12.95, May 1984, 0 233 97618 3
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... grip the arm of his chair, the duty of the male was to provide. For Elizabeth Baker, an incisive young woman who had trained as a teacher, the male’s job was to ‘make something’ of himself. The domestic inappropriateness of this view was quickly overshadowed by the economic hopelessness in which she and her brood were suddenly engulfed. A diabetic ...

Going Straight

Neal Ascherson, 17 March 1983

After Long Silence 
by Michael Straight.
Collins, 351 pp., £11.95, March 1983, 0 00 217001 9
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A Matter of Trust: MI5 1945-72 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 196 pp., £8.95, December 1982, 0 297 78253 3
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... malevolent, piteous or merely inaccurate, ought to be wound up after the publication of Michael Straight’s contribution. Very possibly, Anthony Blunt will one day write such a book himself. But the names have almost all been named, the questions of motive worn smooth, the titles and pensions (some of them) stripped like epaulettes, the spell in ...

The Horror of Money

Michael Wood, 8 December 1988

The Pink and the Green 
by Stendhal, translated by Richard Howard.
Hamish Hamilton, 148 pp., £10.95, July 1988, 0 241 12289 9
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Stendhal’s Violin: A Novelist and his Reader 
by Roger Pearson.
Oxford, 294 pp., £30, February 1988, 0 19 815851 3
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... money. Her many suitors, rapidly attracted by news of her fortune, ‘disgust’ her: ‘all these young men gathered here with the base motive of gaining the millions of my dowry, and to that end affecting all the appearances of a tender sentiment, truly horrify me ...’ As she herself says, she can’t quite account ‘for the nature and the degree’ of ...

What Henry didn’t do

Michael Wood: ‘The Master’, 18 March 2004

The Master 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 360 pp., £15.99, March 2004, 0 330 48565 2
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... the waste and desolation it leaves in a life. In ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, a man tells a young woman that he believes he has a special destiny, that he is ‘being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible’, the spring of a tiger in the jungle. The man refuses all other experiences, including that of allowing himself to ...