Culture spot

Here are one or two cultural items I've seen today.

Agnès is blogging for The Guardian from the Venice Film Festival. She is unimpressed with Kenneth Branagh's offering:

It wasn't quite as bad as the screening of Christopher Hampton's Imagining Argentina, which, in 2003, had the Venice Film Festival audience laughing hysterically when it should have been crying. However, the screening of Sleuth, directed by Kenneth Branagh, must have provoked embarrassment for its producers when it left both public and critics sneering. Despite what Martin Wainwright writes in The Guardian today, the feeling, at least among European film critics, was of huge disappointment if not scorn: why on earth remake a masterpiece by Mankiewicz, which already was a big screen remake of an award-winning theatre play by Anthony Shaffer?

The Telegraph reveals that Juliette Binoche is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. I didn't know, and am disheartened. Who would have conceived of the acting profession as a home for the politically credulous and simple-minded?

The Observer runs a survey on "a forgotten world of literary treasures - brilliant but underrated novels that deserve a second chance to shine. We asked 50 celebrated writers to nominate their favourites."

Many of the choices are gems, though surely not forgotten ones - notably Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Thackeray's Pendennis and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The painfully earnest young novelist Hari Kunzru recommends the dissident Bolshevik Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a "portrait of the terror of the Stalinist purges [that] is superior, in my opinion, to Koestler's Darkness at Noon". I certainly agree. The novel dramatises the assassination of Kirov, which marked the start of Stalin's Great Terror.

My choice of an overlooked literary treasure would be Greenmantle by John Buchan. It's the second of Buchan's five adventure stories of Richard Hannay. Many of my readers will know the celebrated first Hannay story, The Thirty-Nine Steps, at least in its faithless and inferior film version by Alfred Hitchcock. That story ends three weeks before the onset of the Great War. Greenmantle appeared in 1916, and records Hannay's wartime intelligence mission to discover and thwart a German plan to spark an uprising in the Islamic world.

By no means is the book great art, but it is great popular literature. It's also a surprisingly informative account of the politics of the early part of WWI, and - as the reference to political Islam suggests - eerily topical. Its treatment of Turkey's wartime turmoil is brilliant. Among its high points, the book includes a description of a malevolent German officer, Colonel Stumm, that might have come from P.G. Wodehouse: "My anger [says Hannay, after knocking out Stumm] had completely gone and I had no particular ill-will left against Stumm. He was a man of remarkable qualities, which would have brought him to the highest distinction in the Stone Age."

Ever since I started keeping this blog, and then writing for publication, I have sought an opportunity to deploy this matchless line against someone, somewhere, but it's too good to be used without discrimination. It ought properly to be said of someone brutish but not stupid - so not a Chávez or Milosevic figure. I keep it in reserve still.

UPDATE: Also see John Lloyd's review, from The Observer, of Andrew Anthony's book The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence. John thinks well of the book, as do I.