Cleveland

Michael Mason, 10 November 1988

Report of the Inquiry into Child Abuse in Cleveland 1987 
by Elizabeth Butler-Sloss.
HMSO, 336 pp., £14.50, July 1988, 0 10 104122 5
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When Salem came to the Boro 
by Stuart Bell.
Pan, 355 pp., £3.99, July 1988, 0 330 30503 4
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The Last Taboo 
by Gay Search.
Penguin, 192 pp., £3.99, August 1988, 0 14 011049 6
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Unofficial Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse – The Cleveland Case 
by Beatrix Campbell.
Virago, 226 pp., £4.50, September 1988, 0 86068 634 5
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... this year, these men had repeatedly been making sexual assaults of the most extreme sort on very young members of their families, sometimes in a spirit of revolting cruelty. One man had raped his sobbing five-year-old daughter, as she was held down by her mother, and buggered his three-year-old son. The other two had indecently assaulted and buggered ...

Private Lives

Ray Monk, 22 November 1990

... taste for ‘rough trade’. The picture shows Wittgenstein walking down the street with a young man wearing a black raincoat. It was originally published in Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten, edited by Michael Nedo and Michele Ranchetti, with the caption: Wittgenstein mit dem Freund Ben Richards in ...

Athenian View

Michael Brock, 12 March 1992

Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 
by Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 383 pp., £40, September 1991, 0 19 820173 7
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... to all of the University’s High Anglicans. ‘You must believe in God,’ Jowett told the young Margot Tennant, ‘in spite of what the clergy tell you.’ The effects of Biblical criticism and scientific advances on the household of faith take a deal of disentangling. Some leading Late Victorians sought in social work the motivating force which they ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Leviathan’, 8 January 2015

Leviathan 
directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev.
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... in the sand. Is this another Leviathan? The real Leviathan, dead and wasted, a sort of memorial? A young boy goes out to sit with the skeleton when he is upset. The place is the coast of the Barents Sea, not far from Murmansk, but every scene except the last is set in summer, so the cold is not the point. Nor is there any real sense of closeness to ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Judex’, 17 July 2014

... to get into the James Bond market, also true that French mainstream cinema did all kinds of things young filmmakers didn’t like – that’s what the New Wave was about. Still, even if a homage to the past is quite different from raiding it, the near-simultaneity of the two is interesting. Judex was a silent serial Louis Feuillade had made in 1916 – after ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Fading Gigolo’, 19 June 2014

Fading Gigolo 
directed by John Turturro.
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... Murray does have to work to get other clients, and his prize is Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), a young Hasidic widow who needs to escape from her stultifying life and the eager attentions of Dovi (Liev Schreiber), a Brooklyn community safety officer with earlocks and a patrol car. Murray inventively casts Fioravante as a masseur, and the resulting intimacy ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, 6 March 2014

The Wolf of Wall Street 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
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... the normal world – but who wants to live there?’ He takes men and women he describes as ‘young, hungry and stupid’ and turns them into a howling, irresistible sales force, persuading investors to buy lousy stock the traders can dump once they have made a packet from the brief, illusory booms. DiCaprio describes the job as ‘selling garbage to ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Agnès Varda, 5 November 2009

... work to set up house inside some forgotten foyer. At one point she films a protest march, many young people carrying signs urgently calling out for change. Varda herself suddenly appears on the sidelines, a little old lady, as she calls herself, also carrying a placard. It says ‘J’ai mal partout’ – ‘I hurt everywhere.’ This phrase also has a ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Man on Wire’, 11 September 2008

Man on Wire 
directed by James Marsh.
August 2008
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... learned of them when he read a magazine during a visit to a dentist, although of course he was too young to have conceived of his exploit then, and the towers were still just a project. At an early point in the film we see a shot of what looks like Ground Zero, cranes and excavators at work in a deep hole in the earth. But it isn’t a picture of Ground ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Simpsons Movie’, 16 August 2007

The Simpsons Movie 
directed by David Silverman.
July 2007
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... back ‘in the Old Country’. ‘I forget which one exactly,’ he says. A memory flash shows a young Grampa on a boat where everyone has an Irish accent mixed with something that might be Polish. But the subtlest and funniest joke in the episode, the one that best sums up all the hypocrisy thriving then and now on the subject of immigration and therefore ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Prestige’, 14 December 2006

The Prestige 
directed by Christopher Nolan.
October 2006
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... among its impeccable olde London costumes and sets – as if it were looking for a slot between Young Sherlock Holmes and My Fair Lady – it has an edge which is entirely contemporary in two senses. It belongs to the actual life of the men in question, not their legacy, and it speaks to concerns of the 21st century, where science looks more like magic ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Moonlight’, 16 February 2017

Moonlight 
directed by Barry Jenkins.
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... like happy families, are alike? Not quite that perhaps, but the last shot of the film is of the young Chiron sitting on the beach, his back towards us, looking out at the ocean. He sees the moon, and then he turns his head. His wide eyes suggest all the desolation and promise that Juan saw in him at the beginning. If we started again, would things be ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘La La Land’, 19 January 2017

La La Land 
directed by Damien Chazelle.
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... and more especially the part that they play in American mythologies of success. In Whiplash a young musician at a top (imaginary) New York conservatory wants to be the best drummer in the world, to be a legend or nothing. He despises all other forms of life, and finds his match in his ferocious teacher, played with extraordinary relish by ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’, 25 January 2018

Memories of Underdevelopment 
directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.
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... recurring fantasies about sleeping with the girl who comes to clean his flat, has an affair with a young woman, Elena (Daisy Granados), which would be light-hearted for Sergio if he knew how to let go of his irony, and is light-hearted for her until he ditches her. He remembers his schooldays, his first visit to a brothel, an affair with a German girl he ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Barbie’, 10 August 2023

... old, gendered dreams represented by the dolls. When Robbie on her journey approaches a group of young girls, she simpers and smiles in the way she thinks she is supposed to, and the girls are horrified. They left such dolls behind long ago. One of them calls Robbie a fascist. Again, Robbie should probably not know what this means. But she does, and is ...