Two lovers are trapped in the lift of a decaying tower block with a child and an elderly neighbour when the lift shaft catches fire. “So begins a nail-biting white-knuckle ride,” the producers promise. It sounds rather like a Tyneside version of the Towering Inferno, though that movie, not depending on lottery money, didn’t promise “an authentic portrayal of current social issues”.The shooting season evidently started in earnest yesterday. He adds that before he embarked on the film, he had never read the book. Now that’s what I call a deprived childhood.One of the first films to be partly financed by the National Lottery began shooting yesterday.Downtime, a co-production of the Newcastle-based Pilgrim Films, London- based Scala Productions and IMA Films of Paris, is directed by Bharat Nalluri and stars Paul McGann and Susan Lynch. The film, which will be released in October, is disappointingly a little short on the magic of the original, but its indulgence in special effects and quick-fire humour may find a receptive children’s audience.
Terry Jones himself speculates that the book has never been filmed before because it is “too placid and episodic”. Scandalous in its time, Lolita has become the template for a quality of prose that evokes everything and apologises for nothing.John Walsh.
The Wind In The Willows astonishingly has never been made into a film – until now. The force behind the new project is former Monty Python man Terry Jones, who has adapted Kenneth Grahame’s book, directs, and plays Mr Toad into the bargain. Jones has assembled his friends, who are also some of the best British comic talent – John Cleese, Michael Palin, Steve Coogan, and, notably, Eric Idle, who gives a a delightfully whimsical performance as Ratty. Essentially a family saga of Northern miners that is talked up by Lawrence’s apocalyptic prose into something timelessly grand.10 Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita. Invented the “campus” novel, and re-invented the English comic tradition.8 Gabriel Marcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude Latin American fiction on the grandly ambitious scale Poetry and casual exotica of magical realism.9 DH Lawrence: The Rainbow.
Uses a group of choirboys on a desert island to reveal the darkness at the heart of all mankind’s attempts at civilisation.7 Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim. Showed how fiction can recreate the smallest psychological moments and the largest social panorama.4 Joseph Heller: Catch-22. An anarchic satire, scorning society through logic, relentlessly, subversively and hilariously applied.5 George Orwell: Animal Farm. Within a Homeric structure, Joyce uses every verbal and stylistic trick in the literary lexicon.3 Marcel Proust: A la Recherche du Temps Perdu Massive, slow, and operatically ambitious. Still the purest, simplest, neatest and most moving political allegory in literary history, not excluding Candide.6 William Golding: Lord of the Flies. A previous Mori poll on reading habits found 24 per cent of people regularly read non-fiction, with romances, enjoyed by 19 per cent, the most popular fiction choice.Leading article, page 13Our Literary Editor’s Choice1 Samuel Beckett: The Beckett Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable).
A seminal work that has made Beckett’s the most imitated voice of late 20th-century literature.2 James Joyce: Ulysses. In that series, Jackie Collins nominates Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree; Will Self chooses JG Ballard’s Crash; and Ruth Rendell plumps for Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.Martin Lee, marketing director of Waterstone’s, said yesterday that the real attraction of the project was that it would reveal the public’s choice for the first time. Previous lists of best books had largely been determined by literary critics, whose tastes were not necessarily the same as that of the public.”We’ve been extremely anxious to find this out for some time,” he said “We really don’t know what public taste genuinely is. There’s a school of thought among our managers that this list will show that the books at the top of the list will be those that were on reading lists at school and had a formative influence on readers, books such The Catcher In The Rye, Catch-22 and 1984.”Mr Lee added that the public was also free to nominate books outside the fiction category: “Road atlases and maps sell in large numbers in bookshops, but are not conventionally thought of as books.” The results of the public vote will be announced next January.Last year, the BBC’s literary programme, Bookworm, asked viewers to telephone in with the name of the book they had enjoyed most in 1995 The winner was Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks.
