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Unfrozen Sea

Michael Byers: The Arctic Grail, 22 March 2007

... be no sea-ice at all in the summer. Recent satellite measurements analysed by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center are even more alarming. In March 2006 the area covered during the winter by sea-ice was at an all-time low: 120,000 square miles less than the previous year. At this rate, the Arctic could lose all of its sea-ice by 2030. Phytoplankton in ...

Scenes from British Life

Hugh Barnes, 6 February 1986

Stroke Counterstroke 
by William Camp.
Joseph, 190 pp., £9.95, January 1986, 0 7181 2669 6
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Redhill Rococo 
by Shena Mackay.
Heinemann, 171 pp., £9.95, February 1986, 0 434 44046 9
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Striker 
by Michael Irwin.
Deutsch, 231 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 233 97792 9
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... wasn’t even surprising thirty years ago when made by a novelist who had no sense of humour. C.P. Snow’s Corridors of Power is a chore to read now, at least as far as the young are concerned. They don’t care very much that it struck a chord among a mandarin élite which was rapidly becoming disillusioned. Nevertheless, in the course of that novel ...

He wants me no more

Tessa Hadley: Pamela Hansford Johnson, 21 January 2016

Pamela Hansford Johnson: Her Life, Works and Times 
by Wendy Pollard.
Shepheard-Walwyn, 500 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 0 85683 298 7
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... they vaguely knew the name but couldn’t place it – until I said she was married to C.P. Snow and then they vaguely remembered that too. They were much clearer about him: the two cultures argument, and Leavis’s vituperation, and some novels revolving around Cambridge colleges. Someone had read one of those novels long ago but couldn’t remember ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Sisters Brothers’, 9 May 2019

... back in the seat than can be comfortable. The West includes grasslands, rocky crags, forests, snow-capped mountains – all shot, apparently, as American dreams should be, in Spain and Romania. The brothers encounter cultural innovations that surprise them and move them: a toothbrush, a water closet. We see western towns being built, patches of desert ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Napoléon’, 15 December 2016

Napoléon 
directed by Abel Gance.
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... fill the air and finally some teachers arrive, stop the ruckus and throw Bonaparte out into the snow. He walks over to a cannon at the end of the porch, and rests on it. The bird is close by, in a tree, and as if it too knew its destiny, flies down to join him. The amazing thing here, though, is that during the fight the screen multiplies, splitting first ...

The Ticking Fear

John Kerrigan: Louis MacNeice, 7 February 2008

Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems 
edited by Peter McDonald.
Faber, 836 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 571 21574 4
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Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 160 pp., £12.99, April 2007, 978 0 571 23381 6
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I Crossed the Minch 
by Louis MacNeice.
Polygon, 253 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 1 84697 014 6
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The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography 
by Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds.
Faber, 288 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23942 9
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... flings himself into everyday pleasures he cannot escape time and its paradoxes. Here is ‘Snow’, his best-known poem from the 1930s: The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: On Meeting the Creatives, 22 February 1996

... It’s a bad year for snow in Zermatt. Mont Cervin is mostly bare red rock. Even the Matterhorn has only a frosting of snow. But the pistes are all right: every few hundred yards bright yellow snow-making machines, like small snub-nosed cannon, soak up water from the lakes and shoot it ten metres into the air to do what God can usually be relied on to achieve, and keep what skiers there are on the move ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘True Grit’, 3 February 2011

True Grit 
directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.
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... challenge. Henry Hathaway’s 1969 film had rich, bright colours, National Park scenery with snow-capped mountains, long shots of little log cabins nestling in lonely valleys, a fulsome ‘western’ score by Elmer Bernstein, reminding us of dozens of movie trips to the unpopulated wilds, and even a sentimental folksy song delivered over the credits by ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Blade Runner 2049’, 2 November 2017

Blade Runner 2049 
directed by Denis Villeneuve.
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... the second. The weather is still terrible: torrential rain for much of the film, with some elegant snow now and then for scenic reasons. Los Angeles still looks like a crowded, run-down version of Tokyo. Coca-Cola is advertised, and Rick Deckard (played again by Harrison Ford) still drinks Johnny Walker Black Label, although it now comes in a fancy designer ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Wonder Woman’, 13 July 2017

Wonder Woman 
directed by Patty Jenkins.
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... the German opposition and liberate a village. There is beer all round, much terrible music, and snow obligingly, romantically falls. Diana was able to lead the troop across the fields in spite of intense enemy fire because of her magically undamageable bracelets and her ability to see bullets arriving as if in slow motion. Diana quite plausibly thinks ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Swing Time’, 4 April 2019

... is so erratically hot and cold – hence the wonderful song ‘A Fine Romance’, sung in the snow. Finally, it turns out that the neglected fiancée loves someone else, and Astaire is off the hook. ‘Gee, that’s swell,’ he says, remembering only a moment later to feign regret. Earlier, he had said goodbye to Rogers in the number with pennies ...

Like the trees on Primrose Hill

Samuel Hynes, 2 March 1989

Louis MacNeice: A Study 
by Edna Longley.
Faber, 178 pp., £4.95, August 1988, 0 571 13748 2
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Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 160 pp., £4.95, August 1988, 0 571 15270 8
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A Scatter of Memories 
by Margaret Gardiner.
Free Association, 280 pp., £15.95, November 1988, 1 85343 043 9
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... of rain or the crackling of a newly lit fire or the jokes of a street-hawker or the silence of snow in moonlight or the purring of a powerful car. This is a catalogue of the sensory pleasures that any Londoner might know (and note how carefully all five of the senses are brought into it). But it is also an act of self-definition, MacNeice claiming a role ...

Fading Out

John Redmond, 2 November 1995

The Ghost Orchid 
by Michael Longley.
Cape, 66 pp., £7, May 1995, 0 224 04112 6
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... land of transplanted urban dream kingdoms, a paradise for poets who do not wish to be disturbed. Michael Viney’s documentary, The Corner of the Eye, opens with a slow sweep across this landscape, a picture of distances fringed with purple and a few tawny cows nosing through the foreground, then switches to a little white cottage in the midst of it all, and ...

Locke rules

Ian Hacking, 21 November 1991

Locke. Vol. I: Epistemology 
by Michael Ayers.
Routledge, 341 pp., £90, September 1991, 0 415 06406 6
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Locke. Vol. II: Ontology 
by Michael Ayers.
Routledge, 341 pp., £90, September 1991, 0 415 06407 4
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... I imagine, formed our several ideas of what an argument is. But Locke – Locke plods. Aside from Michael Ayers, how many contributors to this issue of the Review, reviewers or reviewees, have read Locke’s Essay, word for word, from beginning to end? Fewer, perhaps, than would like to admit it. But Locke rules. No matter how briefly he is skimmed or how ...

After the Movies

Michael Wood: Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, 4 December 2008

Histoire(s) du cinéma 
directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
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... text, voice-over, moving pictures, stills, paintings, engravings, cartoons. We see the witch in Snow White and the corpses piled up at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück; plenty of Goya, Seurat, Manet; Kim Novak almost drowning in Vertigo, the old major dying in The Magnificent Ambersons; Ivan the Terrible and Stalin; Hitler in one frame immediately followed by ...

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