Cinema
Benedict Cumberbatch takes over the world
What do you do if you wake up to discover your colleagues implying that you have it easy? If you’re Benedict Cumberbatch, you just stick to your Star Trek script… Continue reading
7 Comments
Chin chin, my dear friend
It was a heavy weekend for actor Richard E Grant. Toasting the life of his old friend and Withnail and I co-star Richard Griffiths, the famed teetotaler found his own way… Continue reading
1 Comment
Lurhmann, Baz Lurhmann
Baz Lurhmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby (above) may yet enrage purists; but it seems that the Australian director already has his eyes on another product. Speaking exclusively to Spectator Life,… Continue reading
0 Comments
When art imitates Wee Dougie Alexander
Is Labour MP Douglas Alexander paranoid or very candid? The Shadow Foreign Secretary told a group of luvvies and great minds at the Names Not Numbers festival in Suffolk that… Continue reading
1 Comment
The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock
For the last 40 years it’s been impossible to interview Anthony Hopkins without him doing his Tommy Cooper impression. He’s obsessed with the bloke, constantly interrupting Silence of the Lambs… Continue reading
1 Comment
Brave, the Oscars and the Scottish Cringe.
Hurrah for Brave, the little movie that could! And did! All Scotland salutes her Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Another triumph for the plucky underdogs at Disney-Pixar. That, at any rate,… Continue reading
64 Comments
Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor: beyond chemistry
Regularly voted one of the greatest American novels of the last century, Theodore Dreiser’s moralising epic An American Tragedy (1925) hasn’t aged well. Adapted for the cinema as A Place… Continue reading
0 Comments
Abraham Lincoln ‘somehow’ became the great redeemer
Abraham Lincoln, in Walt Whitman’s celebrated phrase, contained multitudes. M.E. Synon showed yesterday quite how many there might have been. There is evidence of prejudice, callousness and corruption. Yet there… Continue reading
0 Comments
Abraham Lincoln, the ‘specious humbug’
This post by M.E. Synon is the first in a series about Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln. A counter-argument will be published tomorrow, followed by a comparison of screen and literary adaptations of the… Continue reading
3 Comments
Interview with a writer: David Mitchell
David Mitchell slaps a big hand on his head. ‘I look back at that kid and think, what were you thinking! How dare you, idiot!’ He is talking about his… Continue reading
2 Comments
Set down one sentence
Warning: this is a very January 17th sort of thought. It’s meant to be comforting, though you may well find it the exact opposite. Try it on for size, anyway,… Continue reading
3 Comments
Life of Pi asks questions of man, not God
I’m conducting an experiment: Life of Pi concerns a basic metaphor about faith, how is that metaphor rendered in print and on screen? I’ve re-read the book. I’ve deliberately (at this stage)… Continue reading
4 Comments
Mike Newell’s Great Expectations will leave you with great questions
You cannot have failed to learn that a new film adaptation of Great Expectations has been released today. Publicity for the film is ubiquitous: posters of Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch… Continue reading
1 Comment
The Way the World Works by Nicholson Baker – an ideal Christmas present
Nicholson Baker is intensely interested. He looks at the world like he has never seen it before, fixating on the mundane and capitalizing upon the strange lacunae which exist between… Continue reading
1 Comment
Shelf Life: Ol Parker
Screenwriter for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and now promoting his latest film Now Is Good starring Dakota Fanning and Olivia Williams, filmmaker Ol Parker tells us which book is… Continue reading
1 Comment
Shelf Life: Roger Moore
A few surprising revelations from this week’s esteemed Shelf Lifer, as Roger Moore tells us which literary character he’d sleep with, what he doesn’t like doing in his spare time… Continue reading
1 Comment
Do we need to know what a character looks like?
How much attention do you pay to the physical descriptions of characters in novels? Interviewed on Five Live recently about her latest book NW, Zadie Smith said that she never… Continue reading
4 Comments
Katie Kitamura interview
Gone to the Forest is Katie Kitamura’s second novel, about a family and the cost of European colonization in an unknown time and place. Tom and his father live on… Continue reading
1 Comment
Second to the right, and straight on till morning
Much has already been written of the breathtaking, brilliant and slightly bonkers Olympics opening ceremony, but there is one more thing to say on a literary note. Just after we… Continue reading
3 Comments
Peter O’Toole’s new beginning
‘It is time for me to chuck in the sponge,’ said Peter O’Toole with characteristic singularity. The 79-year-old has announced his retirement from stage and screen, after a career that… Continue reading
2 Comments