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Tarkovsky’s Sublime Terror

Andrei rublev, the masterpiece of the great Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, opens with a failed attempt to conquer God. A man attached to a hot-air balloon floats to the upper domes of an imposing church, the tallest structure that a mob of fifteenth-century monks and peasants will ever see in . . . . Continue Reading »

Melancholic Verses

Twenty years ­after publishing his first ­novel—years he spent establishing himself, in incisive, often fearsome essays and reviews and nonfiction books, as a leading literary–cultural critic—Pankaj Mishra had a Damascene moment of sorts. He describes it in a recent essay for . . . . Continue Reading »

A “Somewhere” Composer

It’s about a quarter to ten at night on August 17, 2019, and I’m standing outside the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, smiling. It’s one of those Edinburgh Festival nights when the streets are still crowded but there’s already a foretaste of autumn in the air, a warning chill in the sea breezes that . . . . Continue Reading »

The Lost World of Jazz

Seen today, Jazz on a Summer’s Day shimmers with its glimpses of a world in which people, for all their differences, shared so much. When was the last time so many people got together with such geniality and grace?  Continue Reading »

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