More than a century after his death, Lewis Carroll is still perhaps the supreme enigma of English literature.

No, I take that back. Carroll himself is not an enigma. Although, as we now know, he was an individual infinitely more mysterious than he appeared to his contemporaries, his life and psychology have been rendered intelligible for us by those methodologies, sociological, psychoanalytical or whatever, which apply themselves to refining our [...]

Truffaut once observed that the ordinary man in the street had two jobs, his own and that of film critic. Nowadays, a film critic is also expected to have two jobs, his own and that of ordinary man in the street. Where the cinema is concerned, erudition, formerly the touchstone of all criticism, has become practically a lost cause. Increasingly, the sole means for a critic to survive the inexorable [...]

Just like one of those iris shots beloved of the makers of silent films, let's start by focusing our attention on a single detail, a plaque on a wall: Rue Jean Cocteau. Slowly the iris expands until it coincides with our entire field of vision. The image, now of a dusty, dozy village square in northern France, encompasses a large covered market, a car park, a cluster of shops (one [...]