But the view is so lovely

Michael Wood: ‘Mr Wilder and Me’, 4 March 2021

Mr Wilder and Me 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 245 pp., £16.99, November 2020, 978 0 241 45466 4
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... What follows are a series of closely focused scenes with lots of voiceover. Wilder, then called Billie, is in a relationship with a woman called Hella. They are on holiday in Switzerland when they hear the news that Adolf Hitler has been made chancellor:EXT. MOUNTAIN. DAYA ski run in Davos, Switzerland. ...

Another Country

Adam Shatz: Visions of America, 5 February 2026

... weren’t the Founding Fathers. They were Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Their music embodied the promise of another country, one that was true to its professed ideals. Its very existence seemed miraculous. A vernacular ...

Across the Tellyverse

Jenny Turner: Daleks v. Cybermen, 22 June 2006

Doctor Who 
BBC1Show More
Doctor Who: A Critical Reading of the Series 
by Kim Newman.
BFI, 138 pp., £12, December 2005, 1 84457 090 8
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... on children’s television: he started out as a producer on Why Don’t You?, the BBC’s summer holiday activities and crafts programme, then wrote two science-fiction serials for children’s slots, Dark Season (1991) and Century Falls (1993). These apparently and properly divergent interests fuse, brilliantly, at the centre of Davies’s Doctor Who, for ...