The lowest form of documentary involves a presenter setting off on a journey to discover why he or she didn't yet know something about which we, the audience, were already adequately informed. Near the opposite end of the documentary spectrum are those ...
P resident Barack Obama on Tuesday urged China to strengthen its currency as tensions over exchange rates and trade broke through a carefully orchestrated show of co-operation between Washington and Beijing. Mr Obama made his comments after a three-hour ...
No love lost: Andre Agassi and Boris Becker at the 1990 US Open. Photograph: Getty Images Norman Mailer reckoned that, as big fights loomed, great boxers "begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville". ...
Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's Journals via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories. ...
Did it matter – did it gnaw away at her – that in spite of the high critical standing enjoyed by her stories, Lorrie Moore had not come up with the big novel by which writers, American ones especially, tend to be judged? Yes, there was Anagrams (1986), ...
In my first year as an undergraduate at Oxford - this was 1977-78 - I lived on the ground floor of the Corpus Christi New Building, just across the road from the venerable old college itself. During Michaelmas term, at about two in the morning, I was ...
This stunningly original book is little more than a 100 pages long. You can get through it in an hour, but you'd be mad to hurry, and you will certainly want to return to it many times. The "sum" of the title is from Descartes's "Cogito ergo sum". Its ...
These kind words were scrawled on the proofs of my new novel. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but this less-than-generous verdict on the author was from his wife (to whom the book is dedicated) and it occurred shockingly early on: on the title page, ...
Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1980) came second, behind Blade Runner, in a recent BFI poll of its members' top movies. In outline, it's one of the simplest films ever made: a guide, or Stalker, takes two people, Writer and Professor, into a forbidden ...
Water view...gathering by the Ganges at Sunset. Photograph: Samuel Robbins/Corbis Even people who have not heard of Varanasi have heard of it - it's just that they know it by its other name, Benares. That's how it was referred to by the three ...
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