Why write about the Hundred Years War? This succession of destructive wars, separated by tense intervals of truce and by dishonest treaties of peace, was one of the seminal events in the history of England and France, as well as …
What’s wrong with cannibalism?
“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti,” whispers Hannibal Lecter, before making that scary teeth-sucking noise. But what makes Lecter our favourite moral monster is not that he eats people; it’s that he gruesomely murders …
Why artists sell out
“I’m not green-lighting anything I don’t understand,” says Barry Lapidus, a studio executive at Paramount Pictures. “We’re going to stop developing these rarefied flights of fancy and start applying some good business sense to what we do here.”
This dialogue …
Boris Johnson is no clown
There is a secret pact between the aristocrat and the anarchist. The anarchist dislikes rules, while the aristocrat can afford to ignore them. Kicking over the traces is proof of his authority, not of his criminality. Those who set the …