Huston-Sartre, Sartre-Huston: an odd couple, but not an inconceivable one. Huston wasn’t scared or contemptuous of intellectuals, and he had even directed Sartre’s No Exit in New...
London. The revival of Forty Years On closes after a five-month run. Houses are good and it has made a decent profit but it now makes way for Charlton Heston in The Caine Mutiny. The classified...
One mid-morning in the mid-Fifties, I came across Ken Tynan on Fleet Street, hurrying towards the Evening Standard offices, then around the corner in Shoe Lane. I tagged along as he explained,...
Alec Guinness got off on the wrong foot. Like a great many actors he had an unsuccessful childhood. In adolescence he tried to be someone else and after a time succeeded. He never forgave his...
In the middle of his new book Michael Baxandall wonders whether the ‘complex Newtonian-Lockean sense of how we see’, which he has just expertly expounded, provides any...
The sun shines bright on the homely Victorine film studios in Nice. Meet Pamela is poised to go. Director Ferrand, however, is case-hardened; he knows that, on even such a straightforward...
The psychologist John Layard – ‘Loony Layard’, as he is affectionately termed in one of Auden’s early poems – is said to have told a submarine officer that he had...
In November 1938 Picture Post devoted 11 pages to pictures of a Loyalist attack on Insurgent troops outside Barcelona. They described one, showing men sheltering from falling shells, as...
With more than eight hundred high-grade items to choose from, London Reviews gets the number down to just 28. But already it is the third such selection from the London Review of Books. Is three...
Delay, the reasons for delay, the question as to what kind of behaviour is going on in the business – indeed, the industry – of delaying, is worth some time. For one kind of modern...
Now that Dr Lee has produced a pictorial history of the Anglo-Boer War, one wonders why no one had thought of doing so before. This, of course, is how we are always inclined to greet an unusually...
An egg-shaped space, one half-shell a bank of raked seating, the other a high wall of splintered striated rock, roofed by the sky and stars that Van Gogh saw haloed from Arles. You look down into...
Even those of us who believe that the European Music Year is an invention of Saatchi and Saatchi can hardly deny that la generazione dell’ottantacinque was a formidable crew. How J.S. Bach,...
Thanks to Clive Wilmer among others, an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, photographs and printed material bearing on Pound’s interests in ‘the visual arts’ was mounted for...
The shortest day of the year. We perch on the saddle of a promontory jutting west out of Anglesey into the Celtic Sea and look down into Wen Zawn – the white inlet. It seethes, the waves...
In his own words ‘a queer fish’, Sergei Eisenstein declares at one point in this 1946 memoir that he worked amphibiously, by extremes. ‘I create an arbitrary and capricious...
The Boss paused twice for reflection in the course of his last Wembley concert, on 6 July – twice in three and a half hours of an otherwise relentless exuberance. We all fell silent, gazing...
Nestor Almendros is one of the world’s most sought-after directors of cinematography. He is most closely associated with the French cinema, having shot nine of Truffaut’s films and...