Activity

While Fellini is conjuring up his world in Fellini’s Intervista, Marcello Mastroianni appears once again. For the last time, the creator and his creature are on screen together. The evocation of the glorious Cinecitta of days long gone is counterpointed by the sight of its former splendours. Marcel…

In his colossal biography, Tullio Kezich tells how Fellini, dejected by the tepid response to City of Women (1980), decided to discreetly visit cinemas in Rome to gauge audiences’ reactions for himself. He discovered that ‘the audience had changed planet, it no longer existed’.30 This mournful asse…

There was another side to this generosity. Shirley’s sociability, the alacrity with which she shared her learning and her enthusiasms, could turn at times to intractability, particularly about the UN. And there was the matter of her tendency to monologue, noted by many, and even for good friends so…

[...] Helen Garner, who offered a compelling account of the kind of shift that might take place in the mysterious spaces of reading, taste, and perception. Garner recalled her own early hostility to Hazzard’s novels, “back in the 80s”:

Everyone I knew was swept away by them. I tried to read th…

She mused in her diary on the alignment of passion and morality shadowed by her own sense of fated misalignment—the coming-round of things and the too-late that are so completely expressed in The Transit of Venus—in her new novel. And she reflected on the timing of her own coming to love: “Reading …