Immaculate confections
Wes Anderson discusses how his latest film The Grand Budapest Hotel was sparked by the life and writings of Stefan Zweig. The film is imbued with Anderson’s trademark mix of arch humour, slapstick, stop-motion animation and intricate staging that give a constant and playful nod to the artifices of storytelling and filmmaking. Yet through all...
Brightness and shadows over Europe
As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. That atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes of the kind that I am going to recount here. To be honest, I did not...