Thought Leader

By the term, ‘criminality’, I don’t simply mean the perpetration of crime, or criminal acts; I have in mind something far more fundamental, even primal, in the sense of that which remains behind when criminologists, sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists have exhausted all avenues of causal explanation when it comes to the ‘grounds’ or causal antecedents…

When the first season of True Detective was broadcast — with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as two detectives out to solve a case that seemed intractable in the extreme, with a gritty cinematic style and refusal to compromise itself for the sake of satisfying the usual Hollywood saccharine, sentimentalist demands regarding plot structure —…

There have been all kinds of signs that the future of our societies will probably entail much higher levels of control than is the case at present. The National Security Agency’s illegitimate surveillance, not merely of American citizens’, but of other peoples’ private communications as well, is but one premonition of the shape of things…

Dietmar Brehm’s The Murder Mystery (1992) is a powerfully disconcerting film of only about 15 minutes’ duration. It has been described as sado-pornographic – a description I do not agree with, except for the “sado-“ prefix, which is accurate if this alludes to the impression created by the fragmentary, disjointed, “noir-ish” images flickering across the…

Kazuo Ishiguro is famed chiefly as winner of the Booker Prize for his novel, The Remains of the Day, the virtues of which are beyond dispute, but will not be discussed here. Instead I want to concentrate on his novel of 2000 (shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize), When We Were Orphans – a masterpiece…