On The Buccaneers

"Miss Testvalley comes to regret what she has done and so she should. It is entirely out of keeping with the character and values she is meant to represent." 

But it's not the case. In the synopsis it says Miss Testvalley is instrumental but in the novel she does little specific other than get them to the UK. She even advises Tintagel against proposing to Nan. We know nothing of Hector and Lizzie. Lizzie orchestrates Virginia and Seadown.

Taki on Porfirio Rubirosa

Had he been wearing his seatbelt nothing would have happened to him. But had he been wearing his belt, he would not have been Porfirio Rubirosa.

On The Aviator

The substance of The Aviator is endless jive. By and large Howard Hughes made lousy movies and he made bad planes too, at least, when he was using the government's money. He had money to waste and he wasted it. He didn't have anyone's ass to kiss, which in Hollywood must often seem like heaven, but it didn't make him a genius. Scorsese seems to be channeling Vincente Minelli in one year and Douglas Sirk in the other. Queer theorists will be living off this film for decades.

On Mike Nicholls' Closer

Closer is haute merde. All glitz and no guts. Both key sequences feature Natalie Portman walking in slow motion, a device that Nichols seems to confuse with art.

On Bob Woodward's "Bush At War"

The bare recitation of facts in an out-moded style of journalism. It was ended in the 1950s by the experience of dealing with Senator Joe McCarthy, when journalists realised how misleading it would be simply to report waht he said without informing the reader about his past falsehoods.

Ian Johnston on Stendahl's The Red and the Black

Ultimately, then, for me, one of the main messages of the novel, to the extent that it has a message at all, is the inability of the narrator to pass any sort of reasonable judgment on his story. Inasmuch as he is clearly a successful member of that society, an affluent, well-educated Parisian, who finds nothing but a certain anecdotal amusement. In the tale, I come to see where the source of the real problems in that society might be - the detached urbanity of the civilised person who doesn't care enough, a person for whom the sufferings he relates are unconnected to him, except as an opportunity for many casual evaluative judgments delivered from a detached and superior position, not the vantage, as in Homer, of a sympathetic objectivity, but rather of a sheltered, uncaring amusement.

Then, too, there's the paradox of his attitude to society. For Julien is fiercely ambitious socially. He ha already made up his mind that, despicable as he finds society, his goals are to rise up in that very society. And in many respects his final failure to achieve what Jane Eyre achieves is, I would maintain, linked directly to the fact that he sets himself inauthentic goals in the first place.

In all of this there is a constant sense of how pathetic Julien really is. His vision of himself as a conquering hero in the Napoleonic mode translates itself into complex but endlessly hesitant, self-reflecting and unsatisfying love affairs, which he describes to himself in military language, a style which simply reminds us just how unheroic these achievements are by comparison.

Tony Judt on France and the US

If you want to understand how America appears to the world today, consider the SUV. Oversized and overweight, the SUV disdains negotiated agreements to restrict atmospheric pollution. It consumes inordinate quantities of scarce resources to furnish its privileged inhabitants with superogatory services. It appears to outsiders to deadly risk in order to provide for the illusory security of its occupants. In a crowded world, the SUV appears as a dangerous anachronism. Like US foreign policy, the SUV comes packaged in sonorous mission statements, but underneath it is just an over-sized pick-up truck with too much power.