This weekend found President Obama hitting every Sunday TV talk show to talk up health care policy. For some environmental advocates, this focus deepened their concern that the United States would lose this moment and punt on climate policy. However, take heart, this week the U.N.’s climate summit begins in New York and the President Read More
Denis Dercourt’s The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de Pages), from a screenplay by Mr. Dercourt and Jacques Sotty (in French with English subtitles), plays out—literally and figuratively—as a subtly seductive revenge drama in which classical piano music is featured far more in the foreground than in the background. Indeed, I’ve never seen a movie in Read More
In some contexts, the good, decent humanist approach seems more callous than sheer bloody-mindedness. Here’s how A.C. Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London and nothing if not a good, decent humanist, defines his objective in Among the Dead Cities: “[D]id the Allies commit a moral crime in their area bombing of Read More
So, I’m moderating this panel up at the Newport International Film Festival a little while ago, and it’s on Shakespeare on film, and I’m talking to one of the panelists, Michael York, the British actor who’s just come out with a valuable book, A Shakespearean Actor Prepares–but more to the point, he was a featured Read More
The Great Fire, by Shirley Hazzard. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 278 pages, $24.
In her memoir of friendship with Graham Greene, Shirley Hazzard wrote that her first “encounter” with the writer “seemed to me, and seems still, like an incident from a novel: from a real novel, a good novel, an old novel.” Once Read More
So, I’m moderating this panel up at the Newport International Film Festival a little while ago, and it’s on Shakespeare on film, and I’m talking to one of the panelists, Michael York, the British actor who’s just come out with a valuable book , A Shakespearean Actor Prepares –but more to the point, he was Read More
Shohei Imamura’s Dr. Akagi , from a screenplay by Mr. Imamura and Daisuke Tengan, based on the novel Doctor Liver by Ango Sakaguchi, materializes in all its formal splendor as a gloriously multilevel pop entertainment. It may remind you from time to time of many simpler and more superficial movies in its wildly varied parts, Read More
More publishers exist to perpetuate myths-about celebrity, self-help, money-making, politics, history-than to dispel them, Americans apparently preferring their book reading soft-core and, sometimes foolishly, trusting newspapers and other forms of journalism for factual information. It was in order to counter this trend that the journalist Lawrence Lifschultz and his wife, Rabia Ali, a scholar of Read More
