At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Beast’, 18 July 2024

... visiting various moments in her past and getting rid of lingering loads of feeling. Dressed in a black leather suit, she lies in a tub of liquid, receives an injection in her ear and takes off into the past. The soirée we attended was part of the first of her trips.Let’s look at some of this more closely. Periodically we return to the tub of liquid or the ...

Heart of Darkness

Christopher Hitchens, 28 June 1990

Not Many Dead: Journal of a Year in Fleet Street 
by Nicholas Garland.
Hutchinson, 299 pp., £16.95, April 1990, 0 09 174449 0
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A Slight Case of Libel: Meacher v. Trelford and Others 
by Alan Watkins.
Duckworth, 241 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 7156 2334 6
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... Alexander reminded me that Black once said that he was prepared to let his editors have a completely free hand except on one subject. He forbade attacks on American Presidents in general and President Reagan in particular. Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast ...

On the Dickman Brothers

Stephanie Burt, 2 February 2017

... Hull. His loss isn’t the only topic in Matthew’s poems, or in the poems of his twin brother, Michael, but it is one for which both poets are known – widely known, in the US, as poets go. They have now been introduced to the UK in an unusually designed volume: Brother (Faber, £10.99) contains ten of Michael’s and ...

Knights of the King and Keys

Ian Aitken, 7 March 1991

A Dubious Codicil: An Autobiography by 
by Michael Wharton.
Chatto, 261 pp., £15.99, December 1990, 0 7011 3064 4
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The House the Berrys built 
by Duff Hart-Davis.
Hodder, 299 pp., £16.95, April 1990, 3 405 92526 6
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Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth Dynasty 
by Richard Bourne.
Unwin Hyman, 258 pp., £16.95, October 1990, 0 04 440450 6
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... Practitioners of the black arts of journalism will universally acknowledge that the most accurate as well as the funniest portrayal of their profession is Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop. No one who has ever worked for a paper with a baronial proprietor could fail to recognise Lord Copper and his bevvy of fawning executives ...

Bread and Butter

Catherine Hall: Attempts at Reparation, 15 August 2024

Colonial Countryside 
edited by Corinne Fowler and Jeremy Poynting.
Peepal Tree, 278 pp., £25, July, 978 1 84523 566 6
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Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now! 
by Michael Banner.
Oxford, 172 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 19 888944 1
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... but there has been little comparable debate in the UK. Only with the growth of a significant Black population in Britain in the second half of the 20th century has the question of slavery and its legacies been brought into public view. The children of the Windrush wanted to know their history. Establishing it has not been easy, but mainstream accounts ...

Money Talk

Victor Mallet, 21 December 1989

Liar’s Poker: Two Cities, True Greed 
by Michael Lewis.
Hodder, 224 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 0 340 49602 9
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Lords of Poverty: The Free-Wheeling Lifestyles, Power, Prestige and Corruption of the Multi-Billion Dollar Aid Business 
by Graham Hancock.
Macmillan, 234 pp., £14.95, October 1989, 0 333 43962 7
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High Life 
by Taki.
Viking, 198 pp., £11.95, October 1989, 0 670 82956 0
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The Midas Touch: Money, People and Power from West to East 
by Anthony Sampson.
BBC/Hodder, 212 pp., £15, October 1989, 0 340 48793 3
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... starving children of Ethiopia, on the other the wheeler-dealers of the international markets, the Michael Milkens and their hundred million dollar salaries. Michael Lewis deals wittily with the bizarre and shameless world of the wealthy bond-dealers in Liar’s Poker. In Lords of Poverty Graham Hancock looks at the other ...

Don’t blub

Michael Hofmann, 7 October 1993

Stand before Your God: Growing up to Be a Writer 
by Paul Watkins.
Faber, 203 pp., £14.99, August 1993, 0 571 16944 9
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... I swear, I thought I was going to a party.   I had a new suit made of blue corduroy and new black shoes that came with a free pack of playing cards. I was seven years old. What he was actually going to was the Dragon School (his new suit was its uniform), he had just – through inattention, or distracted by TV – missed the parental announcement. In ...

His Shoes

Michael Wood: Joan Didion, 5 January 2006

The Year of Magical Thinking 
by Joan Didion.
Fourth Estate, 227 pp., £12.99, October 2005, 9780007216840
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... even if she can’t bring herself to take his voice off the answering machine. ‘It’s not black and white,’ Didion remembers a young doctor saying in 1982 about the condition of a niece who was on the point of dying, a proposition that finds its way into Didion’s novel Democracy, where the sceptical and uncrazy heroine says: ‘Not ...

Patriotic Gore

Michael Wood, 19 May 1983

Duluth 
by Gore Vidal.
Heinemann, 203 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 434 83076 3
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Pink Triangle and Yellow Star and Other Essays 1976-1982 
by Gore Vidal.
Heinemann, 278 pp., £10, July 1982, 0 434 83075 5
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... from New Orleans, and only ten miles from the Mexican border. It has a large Latin population, a black ghetto, a corrupt mayor (whose first name was Mayor until he dropped it by deed poll), and an underworld dominated by the shadowy figure of the Dude, who works exclusively through Silent Partners and his answering service. It also has a visiting ...

Spin Foam

Michael Redhead: Quantum Gravity, 23 May 2002

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity: A New Understanding of Space, Time and the Universe 
by Lee Smolin.
Phoenix, 231 pp., £6.99, August 2001, 0 7538 1261 4
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... the subject of much debate. Along the way, Smolin develops many other interesting arguments. From black holes and their thermodynamic properties he deduces that area is in some sense more fundamental in physics than volume (or length). This leads, in turn, to the so-called holographic principle, a belief that the information encoded in the Universe – the ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Fernando Meirelles, 6 November 2008

Blindness 
directed by Fernando Meirelles.
November 2008
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... eerie and memorable in the movie has to do with this head-on approach. The colours shift into near black-and-white, or into faded, altered versions of shades we think we know. Figures vanish into a fog, only bent silhouettes remaining, as if they were slim relics of a Henry Moore exhibition. The screen goes dark. The screen goes white. A traffic light becomes ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Milk’ , 1 January 2009

... five years for manslaughter and committed suicide soon after his release. The film opens over black and white footage of police rounding up and beating up gays in the early 1970s. Newspaper headlines fill the screen, the effect is that of an old-time newsreel. Then we cut to Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, looking drained and sorrowful and a little scared, but ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘An Autumn Afternoon’, 22 May 2014

An Autumn Afternoon 
directed by Yasujirō Ozu.
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... morning suits, younger brother in smart but more casual clothes. Sister-in-law very tidy in black traditional Japanese dress. Bride cloaked in a mountainous confection of pink and white silk, topped by a hat that looks like a small but heavy monument. When she moves it’s as if a tent were shifting its ground. She kneels before her father, he says she ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Hunger Games’, 17 December 2015

... Peeta’s room: he is strapped to his bed, and thrashing about in a crazed fury. The screen goes black, end of movie. Peeta’s brain gets unwashed, but very slowly, and he’s an unreliable ally throughout Mockingjay Part II – at one point he kills a colleague by pushing him into a vast sea of oily lava. I won’t spoil – or do I mean improve – the ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘De Palma’, 20 October 2016

... this decision, as about almost everything else, and his recent movies – Femme Fatale (2002), The Black Dahlia (2006), Redacted (2007), Passion (2012) – are never less than interesting. De Palma has some good comments on the Hollywood system. ‘People are paid a lot of money to get you to do what they want you to do.’ This is by way of excuse for his ...