Observer, 6/17.

The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair is a three-hour series that will begin airing on Channel 4 this coming Saturday. In the Observer, writer and presenter Andrew Rawnsley details the tragic turning point, focusing particularly on Blair's scoffing at warnings from his closest advisors and fellow heads of state:

Over lunch, Jacques Chirac warned the Prime Minister that he knew what to expect because the French President had been a young soldier in Algeria. Sir Stephen Wall, a former ambassador and one of Blair's senior advisers, was privy to this conversation. He recalls Chirac telling Blair that there would be a civil war in Iraq. "We came out and Tony Blair rolled his eyes and said, 'Poor old Jacques, he doesn't get it, does he?'" Wall remarks: "We now know Jacques 'got it' rather better than we did."

Earlier:

Worse for his legacy, and for the world, Iraq has wreaked terrible damage on the cause of liberal interventionism, for which Blair became such a compelling and passionate advocate during the Kosovo conflict. In the Balkans, he found a moral purpose for his premiership that he then amplified as a vision of a world in which states would not be free to slaughter their own citizens with impunity. In the killing grounds of Iraq, that ideal lies bleeding to death.

And in conclusion: "The casualties of war are to be found not just in Iraq. The deaths will also be counted in Darfur and future Darfurs, Rwandas and Bosnias, where murderous regimes will put people to the slaughter with much less to fear from western intervention. That is the most rending victim of Iraq."

Related: Nicholas Watt's front page story.

Ok, also in the Observer. Introducing a wide-ranging survey of cinematic comedy (for a contest and poll you can read about at the bottom of the page), Philip French races through a history ranging from the Lumière Brothers through Chaplin and Tati, Hollywood's screwball comedies and Ealing Studios only to sort of strangely peter out in the 70s with Woody Allen and Steve Martin. But then the names pick and riff on their favorites: Bill Bailey on This is Spinal Tap, Rob Brydon on Midnight Run, Meera Syal on Some Like it Hot, Martin Freeman on Sons of the Desert, Zoe Wanamaker on M Hulot's Holiday, Lucy Davis on The Jerk and - get this - Judd Apatow on Terms of Endearment, Edgar Wright on Raising Arizona, Charlie Skelton on Fletch, Laura Solon on Spaceballs, Dan Mazer on When Harry Met Sally, Annie Griffin on Groundhog Day and Penny Woolcock on Bringing Up Baby.

"The last time I interviewed him, in sunny Los Angeles, he managed to get himself shot on camera, receiving a small wound to his abdomen from a randomly fired air-rifle," recalls Mark Kermode. "'It's no big deal,' he intoned dryly as he stood there, unfazed, quietly bleeding into his underpants. 'It is not a significant bullet.'" Now Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder is opening in the UK and Kermode recommends catching it, calling the oddity "a deceptively slight affair which mischievously hijacks documentary footage of space travel and underwater exploration and reworks it into a fanciful tale of alien invasion."

"Hammer gave us a world all their own, a place with Home Counties woodland masquerading as Transylvania (it was Black Park near Slough), heavily cleavaged vampire women, lashings of fake blood with a strange milkshake texture, and the occasional bad sets, particularly in the later films, as if Dracula lived in a branch of the Angus Steak House," writes Phil Baker, reviewing A Thing of Unspeakable Horror: The History of Hammer Films. "It's immediately recognisable, this land where 'the inns are full and boisterous only until someone mentions a certain word', and [Sinclair] McKay does a tasty job of evoking it."

And then there's...

• Robert McCrum's long profile of Gore Vidal.

• Jay Rayner's interview with Rob Lowe.

• Daniel Whitaker on a proposal to give London its own "Walk of Fame."

• Film-related odds and ends from Joe Neumaier.

• Kelly Grovier's review of Salvador Dalí: An Illustrated Life and Dalí and Film.

• Stephen Bayley on Global Cities, an exhibition at the Tate Modern from Wednesday through August 27.

• Lynn Barber's profile of Peter Blake, "the grandfather of British pop art."

• Alice Fisher on the White Stripes.

Laura Cumming sends in a dispatch from the Venice Biennale, good enough reason to mention a few others: Randy Kennedy and Michael Kimmelman (New York Times), Richard Lacayo (Time), Walter Robinson (Artnet) and Linda Yablonsky and Sarah Thornton (Artforum).

Posted by dwhudson at June 17, 2007 8:37 AM