Masculinity in crisis – portrayed by Michael Douglas
As the Manhattan attorney in 1987’s Fatal Attraction, Douglas epitomises the alarm many men felt for women’s new-found openness about sexuality
Instantly captivating: the mysterious harmonies of Erik Satie
The French composer’s aesthetic was so influential that he gave us the sound of the contemporary world, says Ian Penman
Three great minds explore the enigmas of the universe
It sounds like a Tom Stoppard play. A big-shot philosopher meets a big-shot boffin by way of a big-shot writer…
Bogart and Bacall’s first film together might as well have been called Carry On Flirting
Just a few months after the release of To Have and Have Not, with its sassy, sexy script, the film’s stars were married. But, as in many of Bogart’s films, romance also involved intrigue
Abba’s genius was never to write a happy love song
Benny and Björn may have composed some of the catchiest tunes ever, but even their bounciest melodies are ballasted with melancholy
How The Sopranos changed TV for ever
Peter Biskind describes how a once despised medium became the definitive narrative art form of the early 21st century. But has it now passed its peak?
Four disparate intellectuals
Of Wolfram Eilenberger’s four intellectual heroines, Simone Weil alone really counts as a ‘visionary’, forsaking philosophy for a kind of saintly mysticism
The masque of life
The actors who appear to be doing nothing are now the ones most revered – but acting is natural, says David Thomson: it’s what we all do all the time
Musicals with a message
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Picasso or Matisse? Lennon or McCartney? Impossible to call? No such quandary with Rodgers and Hart and…
The thinking dragon
Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to…
Her own master
‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’…
Shades of grey
In the summer of 1940, after almost 20 years in Paris, Man Ray fled the Nazis for the country of…
On a knife-edge with Stanley
Twenty-five years after making Spartacus, a parable of Roman decadence and rebellious slaves shot in California, Stanley Kubrick made Full…
Tricks and treats
Give thanks to the person who invented Venetian blinds, they say, or it would be curtains for us all. Curtains…
David Bowie: the boy who never gave up
A few years ago Will Brooker spent 12 months pretending to be David Bowie. For several weeks he dressed up…
A sublime lyricist, but no letter writer: Cole Porter’s correspondence is sadly wit-free
‘In olden days, a glimpse of stocking/ Was looked on as something shocking’, carolled the company of Cole Porter’s 1934…
The invisible man behind Hollywood’s greatest films
What do the following filmmakers have in common: Victor Fleming, John Ford, Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch,…
The vampire’s role in Marxist philosophy
‘What!’, railed Voltaire in his Dictionnaire Philosophique of 1764. ‘Is it in our 18th century that vampires still exist?’ Hadn’t…
‘Steer clear of that cave boy, James Dean, and grease ball, Elvis Presley’
Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously…
Art and aspiration
When Adam Gopnik arrived in Manhattan in late 1980 he was an art history postgrad so poor that he and…
Band of bickering brothers
There aren’t many downsides to being a film critic, but one of them is being asked to name your favourite…
Reclaiming Nietzsche
Had you been down at Naumburg barracks early in March 1867, you might have seen a figure take a running…
In the wrong club
Groucho Marx was delighted when he heard that the script for one of his old Vaudeville routines was being reprinted…
Homage to awesome Welles on his centenary
One day in May 1948 in the Frascati hills southeast of Rome, Orson Welles took his new secretary, Rita Ribolla,…
Frank’s world
‘He never went away. All those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But…
