Stephen Phelan

IF you’re going to Lake Baikal, you’re going to Olkhon Island. And if you’re going to Olkhon, you’ll be staying at Nikita’s Homestead. This is the babushka-doll logic of a Trans-Siberian itinerary, especially as the railway passes through Siberia itself. In theory, you are wandering one of the world’s great wide-open spaces. In practice, you are following the same route as every other foreigner aboard the trains here, and probably making all the same stops.

JAMES Salter will turn 88 next month. Nobody could blame the guy for being old-fashioned, although the publication of his new novel All That Is – his first in over 30 years, and presumably his last – has occasioned a certain amount of eye-rolling, to set against the swell of widespread acknowledgement that this great writer’s moment may finally have come. With Updike and Mailer now dead, and Philip Roth recently retired, the lesser-known Salter is the only one of his generation left to fly the flag for post-war American virility.

THERE is a fat, goateed man in a leather jacket standing far too close to a Magellanic penguin. He is giggling nervously – the man, not the penguin – and slowly extending a finger towards the animal’s soft white belly. Surely, I am thinking, he is not actually going to poke this poor bird, which has just swum thousands of miles from the Antarctic to join its colony here at Punta Tombo, a thin, chilly strand of Patagonian desert on the coastal edge of Argentina.

IN the woods west of Amsterdam, between the dunes of the North Sea shoreline and the vast floral-industrial greenhouses where world-famous hypercolour tulips are grown, there is a small working village of intellectuals. Current residents include experts on forgotten medieval cities, a team of linguists attempting to reconstruct the earliest human language, a German philosopher, a former adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin and the novelist David Mitchell, who recently arrived to begin research for a new book.

A FEW years ago, Robert Carlyle found himself in some pretty deep snow. He and a bunch of mostly American actors had been shooting a savage historical comedy-horror in the mountains on the Czech-Slovak border, when their wayward Macedonian director, Michlo Manchevski, was sacked by the studio. Stuck up there under contract, with literally no direction, Carlyle phoned Antonia Bird in London and “practically blackmailed her” to come and take over. He had acted in her previous films Safe, Priest and Face, recommended her to the shivering cast, who sealed themselves in a room, watched those films, and agreed that Bird was the woman for the job.

THE first I ever heard of Rodolfo Walsh was when I read Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine in 2007. By that time, Walsh had been dead for 30 years, but Klein cited him as a posthumous source for her treatise on “disaster capitalism”, and introduced him in the most dynamic terms: “A gregarious Renaissance man, a writer of crime fiction and award-winning short stories … a super sleuth able to crack military codes and spy on the spies.”

WITH Bellow, Vonnegut, Mailer, and Updike all recently departed, Philip Roth is now supposed to be the last living giant of American literature. Roth’s late productivity has become an ongoing wonder of the publishing world, his sustained priapic raging a rebuke to every author and pensioner who has ever gone quietly into decline. At 76, he continues to cast the indignities of old age into one livid fiction after another, as if writing could dispel them, although some have noted that each of these senescent novels has been slighter and weaker than the one before.

PAUL Greengrass was driving around Los Angeles a few weekends ago, conducting a private surveillance of the cinemas screening his new film The Bourne Supremacy. He found it gratifying to watch people buy tickets, for his own “egotistical reasons”. Every other film that Greengrass has directed was made for British television, and he says they were… Read more »

American historians don’t know too much about Ellis Alfred Swearengen. They’re pretty sure he came from Chicago. In 1876, he built The Gem Saloon and Theatre on Main Street in the illegal gold- mining settlement of Deadwood, South Dakota, where he was proprietor until the place burned down in 1899. Given that The Gem became the local centre for “vile entertainment” in that time, raking in over $5000 a night in a town that averaged one murder per day, you could bet your horse that Al Swearengen was a bad man.

NOT one convicted witch is known to have returned from the dead, seeking revenge or legal redress. This may be considered further proof of their innocence by those who still care to defend them. Even the most credulous believer in Satan must now doubt that the devil ever met or marked a single soul among the thousands accused of being his human agents in Britain between the 16th and 18th centuries – most of them women, many of them tortured and executed.