Lord Alfred

Posted on by Tom Fleming

Straight after – or maybe during – the terrifying murder in the shower in Psycho, one of the twin peaks of London film criticism at the time, C A Lejeune of The Observer (the other peak being Dilys Powell of the Sunday Times), marched out of the preview. I say ‘marched’ rather than ‘walked’ because […]

Agent Provocateur

Posted on by Tom Fleming

In these days of increasingly formulaic factual television, it’s refreshing to know that there is one director who when he sets out on a shoot, has no idea of the film he will eventually make. For over thirty years Nick Broomfield has been documenting the social and institutional life of Britain and America in his […]

Summoning the Vortex

Posted on by Tom Fleming

It’s a pity one can’t like Wyndham Lewis more. A brilliant, poverty-stricken rebel, darkly handsome, with a Byronic touch of the saturnine, and irresistible to women, he could so easily be a romantic and mysterious figure. Perhaps he is to his devoted followers in the Wyndham Lewis Society. But for the rest of us – […]

The Open Window

Posted on by Tom Fleming

As Hilary Spurling writes in the second and concluding volume of her already acclaimed life of the great French painter, ‘It is not the least mysterious thing about Henri Matisse that he has had no biography until now, fifty years after his death.’ One reason is that his life was considered too dull to bother […]

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