Stephen Phelan

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.

IN the inventing room at the Cadbury chocolate factory – the most famous, enormous, marvellous chocolate factory in the whole world – experts in white outfits are working on something new. They are pouring hot liquid chocolate out of silver mixing bowls onto large marble tables, spreading it around with spatulas, and shaping it into solid little bunker-structures with a swirly finish. This, we’re told today, is all part of “Project Smile”. But they cannot tell us any more than that.

VIEWED FROM outer space, the traffic in Edinburgh and Glasgow doesn’t look particularly bad. In 2002, the European Space Agency launched a new satellite – Envisat- to monitor air pollution levels across the planet. Envisat sees the spectral traces of man-made gases, such as nitrogen dioxide (NO2), as they rise in vertical tropospheric columns from power plants, shipping lanes, centres of heavy industry and major urban road networks. Compared to places such as northeast China in those terms, Scottish cities form an almost negligible part of a global picture.

SOME physicists subscribe to the theory of parallel universes, which supposes that all possibilities are being played out across an infinite range of alternative worlds. Stephen Fry’s father wasn’t that kind of physicist. “He was interested in single atoms, the particles inside the particles, ” Fry tells me. “In taking everything apart to see how it works.” His mother, meanwhile, had “a mind packed with verse”, and bequeathed Fry her love of poetry.