Michael Caines

Jan 22, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Amber Massie-Blomfield |Michael Caines |Maria Margaronis |Harrison Stetler

A cyclist accusing a driver of getting too close. A quarrel with a man spreading his legs open across two seats of a bus. Kyoto begins with a montage of volatility ripped from the mobile screens of our fractious age. “I think we can all agree on one thing”, the protagonist and narrator Don Pearlman tells us at the top of the play.

Jan 14, 2025 | bibliomania.substack.com | Michael Caines

A grim side note to the news: when the Getty Center opened in Los Angeles in December 1997, it held an exhibition about fireworks; a complementary book duly appeared (Incendiary Art: The presentation of fireworks in early modern Europe by Kevin Salatino); but no actual fireworks were set off to mark the occasion. I don’t suppose anybody paying attention to current events – or familiar with the seasonal dangers to which LA is prey – would be surprised to hear that.

Dec 10, 2024 | theguardian.com | Michael Caines

Long before becoming celebrated (and reviled) as the creator of James Bond, had been a serious bibliophile, building an impressive collection of books from the 1930s onwards. Both Bond and bibliophilia played significant roles in the life of Ian’s nephew, James Fleming, who has died aged 80. Both aspects of Ian Fleming’s work mattered greatly to him.

Oct 30, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Martin Ivens |Michael Caines

Asked why he liked horror films, or terror films as he preferred to call them, Kingsley Amis wrote: “like Mark Twain on a dissimilar occasion, I have an answer to that: I don’t know”. He viewed horror as purely “harmless” entertainment. That explanation might satisfy teenage addicts, but moralists, psychologists and literary critics are inclined to examine the bloody entrails of the genre to divine deeper truths.

Oct 2, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Michael Caines |Robert Potts |Toby Lichtig |Martin Ivens

Poor Cyril Tourneur. This didactic writer of the early 1600s was once regarded as the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy, a mighty work of its kind – and Tourneur therefore figured (in the words of Harold Jenkins) as “one of the most fiery and energetic imaginations possessed by any Elizabethan writer”. An Elizabethan (or even Jacobean) writer’s stock doesn’t get much higher than that.