Guns, Blood and Popcorn
Cinema Speculation, by Quentin Tarantino, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 400 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1474624220 The best bits of Quentin Tarantino’s first book, the 2021 novelisation Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, happened when the narrative was put on hold and QT spoke right at you ‑ about cinema! ‑ in a voice unmistakeable from TV interviews […]
Westward Dreams
The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy, Picador, 400 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-1524712396 Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy, Picador, 192 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-1447294016 ‘Tell a dream and lose a reader,’ Henry James warned us, but Cormac McCarthy hasn’t been listening. For sixty years he’s been writing novels that, at critical moments, use dreams to spin parables […]
The State of Us
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. – Cicero The late twentieth century saw the fall of both Homo Sovieticus in Russia and, a little less noticed in the wider world, Homo Catholicus in Ireland. Autocratic nationalism replaced the former, forms of liberalism the latter. […]