Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew O'Hagan
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Given that most movies are bad, and that there are whole categories and sub-categories of badness - the sequel, the Madonna Movie, the Friday 13th Series, or Movies Starring John Travolta Before Pulp Fiction - it is almost impossible to choose a single film for worst movie of all time. But strangely, I do have a nomination and I believe it is actually the worst movie ever made. It is Boxing Helena. The director is David Lynch's daughter, and the film comes with the almost insane-making faults that the family connection might imply.
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I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.
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Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.
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I don't believe in the meteoric culture of anxiety, generally. Obviously, some people have it, some people are crippled by it, but most of the novelists I've ever known are in love with influence. They thrive on it.
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When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.
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The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.
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I always knew I would come to London. I loved Glasgow, but it seemed filled with echoes of my parents' lives, and sometimes you just want a city of your own.
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Events in America show the extent to which democracy there is fuelled by populism - Barack Obama's victory is a manifestation not of Washington's need for change, but of America's. That is not how democracy works in England.
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When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.
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The characters in 'Be Near Me' come from a genuine place, a Britain that is more than one country and more than one ideal.
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High culture isn't what it used to be.
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We now live in the era of fake consensus, or phoney populism, a condition in which galleries and homes are seen to succeed best where they manage feelings of non-difference.
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I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.
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A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.