Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
Shadowlands
(dir. Richard Attenborough) (1993) “We read to know we are not alone”…so we appreciate the intellectual tug of love between lonely but accomplished Clive Staples (Jack) Lewis of Magdalen College, Oxford and lonely precocious poet Joy Gresham (“the Jewish Christian Communist American”) in this simple, sad and beautiful film, easily Attenborough’s best (and a lot shorter than his Oscar acceptance speech for Gandhi, or so it seems). William Nicholson adapted his earlier TV and film scripts with additions based in part on the lovely book by Joy’s son, Douglas (“Lenten Lands”) and the script is wondrous – tasteful, literate and…
Continue Reading →The Wannsee Conference & the Final Solution
(by Mark Roseman) 20 January 1942 – 15 government men, “fifteen serious, intelligent men” met at a villa on Lake Wannsee “to give their assent to genocide.” Roseman’s concise account is a superb reconstruction, amply supported by evidence. Yet as he says, the Conference per se “was not the moment of decision.” We do not know just when Hitler set his hideous policy but Wannsee was clearly a watershed in the clearing of bureaucratic hurdles and articulation of logistics. Of course, Hitler had had the so-called ‘Jewish question’ in mind for a long time. Mein Kampf drips with extermination babble –…
Continue Reading →Bertie
His Mutti Loved Him
(Jane Ridley) If, like my mother-in-law, you don’t enjoy books about the generation of British and European royals who were Queen Victoria’s children because Queen Victoria was so “beastly” to them, stay away from this biography of Prince Albert Edward/King Edward VII. Victoria is a mother who – knowing that her letters could well be preserved for posterity and made public – wrote to her daughter Vicky, Bertie’s sister, “The nose…is becoming the true Coburg nose, and begins to hang a little, but there remains unfortunately the want of chin which with that very large nose and very large lips is no…
Continue Reading →Under the Skin
(by Michel Faber) OK, OK, we get the message, Mr Faber. You have confirmed something we all know. Sigh. But you also confirmed something else for us here at TVC – that in no circumstances, whatsoever, is it a good idea to hitchhike. TVC had seen the film before reading the book (the two share little in common other than the name), and had read a spoiler somewhere explaining just why Isserley works so hard to pick up male hitchhikers; so there were no real surprises. It would be better to come to this book with little foreknowledge. The story…
Continue Reading →World Order
(by H Kissinger) World Order is a knotty concept prone to interpretations of violent subjectivity. On the one hand, we have the seers of doom, who see only a world in chaos and inevitable decline (e.g. Mark Steyn). Farthest from this on the spectrum are the utopian promoters of one world governance (to whom one recommends an urgent reading of Thomas More). Along the way are those who deprecate the notion of order at all, preach heterogeneity and the cult of small-as-beautiful, the barrackers of old powers, cultists for the new such as the revived Middle Kingdom or ISIS, or…
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