politics

Corporate thrillers are my thing, and ones set in broadcasting doubly so. Mann films the CBS half with the tension he’d normally give a heist: lawyers, standards meetings, the slow discovery that the network absolutely, in fact, will fold. His characters keep fucking up their own shit on principle, and I’ll watch that every time. Crowe is very good as Wigand, all clenched jaw and short fuse. Pacino does a lot of stock Pacino, which is fine by me. But Christopher Plummer’s Mike Wallace is the best thing in it, vain and shrewd and a lot better at his job than anyone in the room wants to admit. At 157 minutes it isn’t flabby, though nobody would miss, oh, let’s say, fifteen of them.

Arnold-Foster offers a cultural history that traces nostalgia’s journey from a fatal medical diagnosis (a homesickness severe enough to kill C17th Swiss mercenaries) to the soft, wistful feeling we recognise today. She is compelling on nostalgia’s medical past, but earns contemporary relevance by showing how the emotion was gradually weaponised by advertisers, politicians and an industry happy to sell the feeling back to us. She’s admirably even-handed on its political use: the left have our own sentimental golden ages (the heydays of the NHS and BBC) as well as its recent association with the dreaded MAGA and Brexit. Her argument that nostalgia is rooted in selective, reconstructive memory gives the book genuine rigour. Occasionally the sweep outruns the depth, but as an introductory history of a feeling that quietly shapes how we vote, buy and remember, it’s illuminating.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​