history
Peter Forbes
Daniel Levitin makes one reference to Donald Trump in this book (to the latter’s claim to have seen on TV “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City cheering when the Twin Towers fell) but he couldn’t have known quite how apposite these words would be on publication: “In the current information age, pseudo-facts masquerade as facts, misinformation can be indistinguishable from true information.”Levitin belongs to a best-selling group of experts – Daniel Kahneman, Gerd Gigerenzer, David Spiegelhalter, and a few more – who want to put us right on the pitfalls of dubious statistics and Read more ...
Michael Scott
The Guardian called Brexit “a rejection of globalisation.” That’s as may be, but the reality is we cannot, however much we might want to, check out of the globalised world in which we live. Globalisation has defined the 20th and 21st century and while the future is uncertain, one thing we can sure about is that it will continue to become ever more inter-connected.The question is: how best to prepare ourselves to make the most of it? This is a newly personal question for me, having become a father for the first time in 2016, with my mind now turning more and more not just to how I think about Read more ...
Clem Hitchcock
North London’s much loved Estorick Collection is reopening its doors after a five-month spruce up. The Georgian listed building that houses a 120-piece collection of modern Italian art now boasts a new glass conservatory, opened out entrance hall and "daylight-enhanced" gallery spaces. It all bodes well, even if the reliance on a period of prolonged British sunshine to complete the effect feels a touch optimistic right now. Here’s hoping.The Collection’s return is marked by a temporary exhibition surveying a seldom highlighted episode from World War One. From 1917-18, thousands of British Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Audiences cannot fail to register the enormity of Martin Scorsese’s achievement in Silence. At 160 minutes, it hangs heavy over the film: adapted from the 1966 novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, Silence has been close on three decades in the director’s preparation. It raises questions that are usually approached with Capital Letters. There are moments that are visually enthralling, landscapes of nature that dwarf the sufferings – visceral, in the literal sense, since they involve damage to the human body – inflicted on many of its characters. We’ll leave the “and yets” to later…The Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just 22 years old, South Africa’s national “Day of Reconciliation” on 16 December has shuffled into its perplexed young adulthood. Although commemorative events abound, few people seem to know how to strike the right note for this (just) pre-Christmas holiday. It symbolically occupies a date dear both to Afrikaners - victory over the Zulu kingdom at the Battle of Blood River in 1838 - and to their erstwhile victims. On 16 December 1910, Africans protested against their disenfranchisement, while on the same day in 1961 the armed wing of the ANC - Umkhonto we Sizwe - came into being. One Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Ebullient, prolific, loquacious and a charmingly enthusiastic historian both in print and for television, Simon Sebag Montefiore has turned his attention to the pivotal city of Vienna, nourished equally by the Danube and its central geographical position in Europe.Images, both interior and exterior, were punctuated by our intrepid explorer-historian, characteristically garbed in bright blue shirt, giving scale to street and landscape, and easily picked out by his trademark jaunty straw hat as he walked through imperial Vienna. It was history experienced on foot, matching intellectual and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
DW Griffiths's 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, became notorious for its pejorative portrayal of black people and its heroic vision of the Ku Klux Klan. For his directorial debut, Nate Parker has appropriated Griffiths's title and whipped it into a molten onslaught against America's history of slavery and racial prejudice.Arriving in an America outraged – yet again – by police violence and witnessing the rise of Black Lives Matter, Parker's The Birth of a Nation was uncannily timely, and it prompted a studio bidding war when it premiered at Sundance in January this year. It's a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As an old Sixties lefty brought up on paranoia-infused thrillers like The Parallax View or All the President's Men, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American conspiracies. However, in contrast to his earlier labyrinthine epics Nixon and JFK, this account of CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden keeps clutter to a minimum as Stone fashions a tense, fast-moving drama which will leave you pondering over what's really justifiable for the greater good.It's no great surprise to find that Stone portrays Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter was released in 1968, the screenplay adapted by James Goldman from his long-running play. Loosely based on historical fact, the Lear-like plot charts an ageing King Henry II’s futile attempts to choose a successor after the premature death of his eldest son.The film’s pleasures are many. A hyperactive Peter O’Toole chews up the scenery as the monarch, aided by a superb supporting cast. Crucially the film looks right: filmed on location in France, we really do get a sense of the era’s grubbiness. Badly-dressed peasants and numerous chickens flood the few Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Latin America has learnt from harsh experience just what the legacy of dictatorship involves, when the structure itself may have been dismantled but the psychology that it engendered remains. It’s a subject that has been tackled by many of the continent’s filmmakers, prime among them perhaps Pablo Larrain in Chile, for whom such explorations have themselves become part of the slow process of moving on from that past.The Clan has Argentina's Pablo Trapero dramatising a real-life story from the 1980s that is as chilling as they come, while the manner in which he approaches it only underlines Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The jungle, a region of Edenic fantasy and unspeakable terrors, has always fed the white man’s imagination as well as kindled his greed. Not surprisingly, this is rich ground for the movies – a place beyond time, the home of noble savages and an El Dorado to be stripped of its riches. In most jungle movies, including The Mission and The Emerald Forest, the indigenous population is romanced or demonised, or a mixture of both. Werner Herzog, with Aguirre, God of Wrath and Fitzcarraldo, managed to temper the exoticism that tends to colour the outsider’s view of nature untouched and cultures Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
From the schoolroom straight to the throne: it was a rapid rise for 18-year-old Victoria, and managing as monarch wasn’t helped when everyone around you had their own agenda and was raring to act on your behalf. Moving nicely from TARDIS to palace – and mercifully from Alexandrina (even worse as the shorter 'Drina) to Victoria – Jenna Coleman in the title role combined wide-eyed innocence with an independence and hints at a steelier impetuosity that delivered well in this opening episode (of eight) of what has already been dubbed the new Downton.And not only because of its primetime Sunday Read more ...