‘Comedy is tragedy plus time,’ says Alan Alda’s character in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanours. And later, ‘if it bends it’s funny, if it breaks it’s not funny.’ For various reasons I was in Moscow in 1957, shortly after Kruschchev assumed power and at about the time that Molotov was shot. Which is to say … Continue reading The Death of Stalin

I was always in the kitchen at parties, hiding behind the pots, avoiding the pot, the fun and laughter and the people getting off with each other. And I was all set to hate The Party.  A few years ago, I went to see Transformers 9:  Revenge of the Batteries with my son and I … Continue reading The Party

Philip K Dick was a truly visionary writer whose massive oeuvre of science fiction novels has proved fertile ground for film-makers. Ridley Scott’s 1982 re-telling of Dick’s novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ – filmed as Blade Runner – has gained cult status over the years for its beautifully realised post-apocalyptic Los Angeles landscape, … Continue reading Blade Runner 2049

Paul Fournel’s Anquetil, Alone is part biography, part hagiography, part limpid, poetic treatise and part a prose meditation on one of the greatest ever cyclists; the first to win 5 Tours de France and the first to win the Tour and Vuelta in the same year. Fournel traces Anquetil’s life through a series of lyrical … Continue reading ‘Anquetil, Alone’ by Paul Fournel