Cinema

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 really bothers with them, either as a reader or a writer. ‘Descriptions of how people look – how many of them have you read?’ she asked. ‘They go on and on. They never really add much, though. I usually pass over them.’ My initial reaction was: really? They never add much? I haven’t read NW yet, but my mind went back to The Autograph Man, Smith’s second novel. It only struck me halfway through that I didn’t know much, if

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 a farm in a country that recalls, at first and most often, J.M Coetzee’s South Africa. It is on the brink of civil war. The novel opens with a broadcast by the land’s natives, which Tom overhears on a radio that has been left, eerily, on the homestead’s verandah. The men’s strained relationship is compounded when a sly young woman, Carine, comes to live with them. Their sinister dealings with each other, the other white farmers and servants expose the

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 were treated to hundreds of dancing doctors and nurses, once the children were all settled down for the night, tucked in under their snazzy illuminated duvets, the camera snuck under one of the duvets to show a little girl, reading a book by torchlight. Reading under the covers was a wonderful part of my childhood, as I’m sure it was for many other book-lovers and the quotation from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, read aloud by J.K. Rowling, was an apt

‘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 will span 56 years: with two films in post-production to be released next year. He goes, he said, ‘dry-eyed and profoundly grateful.’ He will devote his time to finishing a third volume of memoirs, which will record the ‘meat’ of his Hollywood career. The two previous volumes — Loitering with Intent: The Child and Loitering with Intent: The Apprentice — stand largely unread on my bookshelves. I dip into them from time-to-time; they’re that sort of book. O’Toole is wonderful

The word ‘reboot’, is the most weaselly term I’ve heard in film since people started talking about scripts needing ‘edge’ twenty years ago. A reboot is not a remake or a prequel or sequel or any of that cheesy commercial fare; it’s a reboot, a subtly different, very sophisticated, creative endeavour that has been employed to bring an old film to life, usually by making it in 3D. Remember when Sellafield was called Windscale or even Calder Hill?   I owe my new career to that horrible word, reboot. I was a screenwriter but recently crossed to writerly shed to become a novelist — or, in deference to the pigeon-holing

The long war between France and the US has its liveliest consequence in the world of film: Hollywood does movies, the French do cinema. In terms of equipment, the Yanks were the pioneers, but France’s Charles Pathé was the first tycoon and — more importantly — George Méliès was the inventor, by accident, of the method of cutting from scene to scene which has become the signal contribution of cinema to narrative. After the invention of talkies, Hollywood pulled out of sight and sound of its panting pursuers, but the French have remained obstinately inventive and creatively resentful: they harbour an abiding sense of having been robbed of an art