He followed that up with Insomnia, which pitted Al Pacino against a villainous Robin Williams in a perpetually light Alaska. Though somewhat less original than Memento, it still did the job of a psychological thriller very well.

I wasn’t super keen on The Prestige, with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival magicians, but with Batman Begins, and later, The Dark Knight, Nolan returned to the visionary filmmaking he demonstrated in Memento.

I’m hoping that Inception, with its stellar cast and mindboggling conceit – Leonardo DiCaprio can mess with your dreams (like a better looking version of the BFG?) – will prove to be another Nolan masterwork.

French filmmaker Thomas Balmes has made a documentary starring four babies, born and being raised in four very different locations: Mongolia, Namibia, San Francisco and Tokyo.

Look out for ace Namibian baby balancing a pot on head while walking.

[P.S. I know it's been a long time since I last posted anything, indeed SO long that even my DAD wants to know what's going on... to which my only excuse is that I've been busy learning things, about the retail sector, and then the media sector. But with the summer lengthening of the days, I am hopeful I will find time to blog more often.]

The Rhone river, seen from a Domaine Vernay vineyard

Christine Vernay was on holiday in Missouri when she got the call. It was August 12 2003 and the French vineyard owner was not due to return home for 10 days; the harvest on her Rhône valley estate would begin in late September. But then a friend from Condrieu called her husband’s mobile phone.

“The grapes have ripened early. You need to come home now,” he said.

France was sweltering in the most extreme heat wave on record. Christine and her husband, Paul Ansellem, caught the first flight back but by the time they reached the vineyards most of the grapes in their 18 hectare estate had shrivelled on the vine.

Instead of rows of plump, light golden fruit, the couple found shrunken berries, burnt brown by the sun. “We’d never seen anything like it,” says Christine, a petite 52-year-old mother of two, who took over the renowned Vernay estate from her father in 1997. She scrambled to arrange a harvest within three days of their return. Even so, the vineyard produced only half its usual volume of wine that year. The grapes were simply too desiccated.

Ms Vernay’s experience offers a stark preview of what scientists say could be the future of the wine industry in southern Europe. Heat waves like that of 2003 will occur with increasing frequency in coming decades, they predict, while average yearly temperatures will continue to rise.

Martin Beniston, a senior climate scientist at the University of Geneva, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: “Current research suggests that by the end of the 21st century, one summer out of two will be at least as hot as 2003. Which implies that certain summers may be even hotter. Where one heat wave summer can have a beneficial effect on some grapes, several in a row would take a heavy toll on all but the most robust species.”

Since 2003, every summer but one – 2007 – has been hotter than the average of the 30 years before, according to France Météo, the meteorological office. This summer was France’s fifth hottest since 1950, with the average temperature 1.3° C above normal.

In August, for five days in a row, temperatures in southern France reached 40° C; in Languedoc and Beaujolais, grape-picking began in late August, while even in northern France wine growers are preparing for a premature harvest.

“It will be a very early vintage, without a doubt,” says Jean-Louis Vézien, director of CIVA, the Alsace organisation of wine growers and handlers.

Franck Thomas, European sommelier of the year in 2000, believes the result is already altering French wine “profoundly”. “If you harvest earlier . . . the alcohol content is higher [and] it unbalances the wine. For instance, with red wine, you have the maturity of the alcohol but not the tannins coming from the skin. So you lose the freshness, and the wine becomes tart and unpleasant.”

He is not alone in his concern. In August, Thomas and 49 of France’s top chefs, sommeliers and wine producers wrote to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, arguing that climate change was threatening the survival of the wine industry and pushing for France to demand a 40 per cent cut in global carbon emissions by 2020 at this December’s Copenhagen conference.

“French wines, jewels of our shared, cultural heritage, elegant and refined, are in danger,” they wrote in the letter, which was published in Le Monde. Their fear is that rising temperatures in southern Europe could render centuries-old practices of wine growing irrelevant. Grapes across the Mediterranean would roast on the vine before reaching full maturity.

France’s position as a revered producer of wine is thanks to centuries of cultivation, after the Greeks and the Romans imported techniques of viticulture into the Burgundy, Bordeaux and Rhône regions. But it rests on the delicate balance of climate and soil.

“France’s primacy at the top level of winemaking is an accident of nature,” says Alun Griffiths, wine director at Berry Brothers & Rudd. “France just happens to be in the perfect position to make a range of fantastic wines. It’s considered a reasonably marginal climate – just a bit farther north in Britain it’s not quite hot enough; Africa is too hot.”

If that changes, the specificity of certain wines could be destroyed for ever, according to Franck Thomas. “In 2003, the wines lost their identity. It was very bizarre. Wine from the Loire valley tasted like wine from the Rhône. If we don’t do something now, in 30 years we will have that problem every year.”

The village of Condrieu is about 40km south of Lyon, and overlooks the wide Rhone river at its only turn. Curving upwards from the Rhone are rounded, lumpy hills; not terribly high, but steep.

As far as the eye can see, vineyards stipple the light brown hills with green. The vines grow in orderly, narrow rows, defying the inclines, as if someone has combed the hills with a green-fingered brush.

Ms Vernay’s father, Georges, made 54 harvests before handing over the running of his Condrieu estate to his daughter. In all but two of those years, the harvests fell at the end of September. Now that has changed.

“Since I took over we’ve had 10 consecutive years in which our harvests have been about 10 days earlier than normal,” says Christine Vernay. “The vineyards are a witness to climate change as it is happening now. Of course we can think of ways to adapt in the short-term, but it’s most important that we start stopping or slowing down the change in climate. Otherwise we are facing real catastrophe.”

This article was first published in the Financial Times, here.

There were the stalwart inheritance tracks; the music that I work to; the music I go to sleep to when my brain’s still working. Let’s just say the churn rate was very low.

Imagine my surprise when one artist and his one and only album managed to supercede every other track on my ipod after just three months, taking not just the no.1 and no.2 and no.3 spot in the most listened to list, but every other spot until the album runs out.

If you know Bon Iver, and his 2008 solo debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, you may understand. It’s an incredibly beautiful album.  

It’s not brash or pushy. The first time you hear it, it doesn’t get you in a stranglehold; it’s more of a gradual, stealthy bewitching. By the third and fourth times you don’t really want to hear anything else. I didn’t consciously listen to the whole entire album on repeat hundreds of times, but that’s what must have happened.

The ‘Iver’ in Bon Iver is pronounced like the French ‘hiver’ for winter. His real name is Justin Vernon, and the story of For Emma – how it came about, from what pain and solitude it sprung – is beautiful and worthy of myth-making in its own right.

You can learn about it here, in a short, sweet video interview Vernon did with the Guardian, that includes an acoustic performance of one of the album’s best tracks.

You can also listen to track 3 on the album, Skinny Love, here.

The Guardian’s latest audio slideshow: a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the set design for A Streetcar Named Desire, which is currently playing at London’s Donmar, starring Rachel Weisz.  It’s informative, beautiful and brief enough to enjoy in a coffeebreak at work. Plug in your headphones and press play.

Perhaps this vacuum exists because the stories behind contemporary poverty seem too familiar, too inevitable. Because we know there are no simple solutions and therefore happy endings are unlikely.

In 19th century England, many outrages were brought to light through parliamentary lobbying, popular fiction or local campaigners. In Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies we meet Tom, a child chimney sweep, who

cried half his time, and laughed the other half. He cried when he had to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it did every day in the week; and when his master beat him, which he did every day in the week..”

The book proved a partial catalyst in the passing of the 1864 Act for the Regulation of Chimney Sweepers. Dickens’ Oliver Twist helped usher in reform of the workhouses.

Perhaps these past social wrongs – child chimney sweeps, malnourished orphans – were in some sense easier than ours: easier to identify, to condemn, to regulate. The abuses we are left with seem truly obstinate. If you watch Lukas Moodysson’s heartrending film, Lilya 4-Ever, about sex trafficking – one of the worst scourges of our society – you will be left feeling not only traumatised but also powerless: there are already laws against it, there are whole police divisions working on it, and yet still women are being trafficked for sex.

All of this is partly why the Dardenne brothers are cultural heroes of our time: they make films that star the poorest and most marginalised of our society. The other reason is that they are simply outstanding film-makers.

Their latest film, Lorna’s Silence, is about an Albanian immigrant in Belgium, who wants to open a snackbar with her boyfriend. In order to do this, she must become a citizen. So she marries a heroin addict, on the proviso that after some time, they will divorce. The problem is, the heroin addict starts to get better. And her underworld handler, who arranged the marriage, has another scheme: Lorna is to marry a Russian mafia member who also needs citizenship, and if necessary, kill her addict husband. Talk about moral dilemmas.

Exploring the limited options of impoverished people in tight corners is a Dardenne speciality. Their 2005 film, L’Enfant, which won the Palme d’Or, is shocking because it shows with brutal honesty what happens when a ‘child’ – someone who, though adult, has been given no moral or ethical guidance – conceives their own child. It is a film that, like Moodysson’s Lilya, is difficult to watch, yet it manages to be compelling, and more extraordinarily, to make us care deeply for its damaged protagonists.

These are filmmakers on the outskirts of the industry, and their films are only ever given limited release; they do not promise escapism. But still we should be grateful they exist at all.

His first novel, serialised in 1912, was set on Mars. For his second, he chose another “alien” territory: the African jungle. Burroughs, who lived in Chicago, had never been to Africa. Nonetheless, one of the most enduring fictional icons of the 20th century was born.

Tarzan was a sensation, swinging effortlessly from novel to comic book to cinema screen. Since 1912, Tarzan and the Apes has been translated into 56 languages, while the character has spawned almost 15,000 comic books and 42 feature films.

A new exhibition at Paris’s Musée du quai Branly tracks Tarzan’s impact on popular culture. Curator-anthropologist Roger Boulay spent 18 months amassing hundreds of items, ranging from first editions of the novels, which he acquired on ebay, to a stuffed crocodile and a tunic made of panther fur from Mali. He is most interested in the power of association: how cultural iconography is played out in different eras and media.

One of the first objects in the display is an arrangement of glossy miniature toys: a plastic Batman, a Catwoman and a Tarzan glued together like an ultra-contemporary triptych. Boulay made this himself, and has placed it close to a painting of Hercules by Toussaint Dubreuil, dating from 1618, and some suspended Disney figurines.

Clearly, they are related, these strapping, sinewy superheroes. The overlapping genres – painting, sculpture, promotional toy – testify to the easy translation of myths across time, the appeal of an archetypal figure, in this case the superhuman navigating a hostile natural world.

The highlight of the exhibition is a treasure-trove of original comic storyboards, including those by the master illustrators Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth, alongside a room devoted to the Tarzan films. The hand of the censor is evident in both media, as the eroticism inherent in the myth became too outrageous for regulators. There is a beautiful scene censored from the 1934 film Tarzan and His Mate, in which Jane swims naked underwater, while a 1947 comic storyboard showing a topless Jane appears with the revised version, in which she is more modestly attired in a leopard-skin bikini.

Elsewhere, a huge figure of King Kong, borrowed from the promotional department of Peter Jackson’s 2005 film, signals not only our post-Darwin obsession with primates, but also the repetition of a familiar scenario played out in Tarzan and the Kong narrative: the vulnerable white woman snatched by a primitive beast. A more explicitly transgressive version is also on show, a first edition of the 1925 erotic novel Ouha King of the Monkeys, in which a millionaire’s daughter falls in love with an orangutan.

Disappointingly, Boulay does not interrogate the disturbing context of these images. As Alex Vernon points out in his book On Tarzan, they reflect a deep-seated anxiety over interracial relationships, extending from colonial times into the mid-20th century. Burroughs (pictured right) neutralised the issue by making his ape-man the descendant of British nobility, allowing Jane a relationship with a primitive “other” while protecting her from its real implications.

Raymond Corbey, an anthropologist and specialist in the ape-man phenomenon, says that if the exhibition does not unveil the “true” Tarzan, it is not necessarily Boulay’s fault. “These images of Africa as the ‘other’ are deeply ingrained in European cultural identity,” he argues. “It’s very hard for a curator to overcome that. The rhetorical force of the images is so strong it can overpower any attempt at deconstruction.”

The exhibition is in many ways fun; visually exhilarating and light-hearted. But in celebrating a western pulp version of Africa, Tarzan! seems at odds with the ethos of the Musée du quai Branly, which opened just three years ago with the express purpose of displaying non-western art. Boulay insists this is the point: his focus is the myth of Africa as perpetuated by the Tarzan stories, not the reality.

But the museum has surely missed an opportunity in bypassing Tarzan’s more troublesome elements. The ape-man character and his continued popularity is ripe for deconstruction; in 1999, Disney created a Tarzan who exists in an Africa without Africans. Black characters were entirely removed from the narrative. The studio seemingly didn’t know what to do with the deeply racist presentation of Africans in Burroughs’ novels. In itself, this cultural evasive action is fascinating, and could have been usefully explored. Instead, the exhibition ultimately schools us in nothing but the power of myth itself.

This was first published in the FT arts section.

In terms of telling complex stories to mass audiences, film is the most effective communication medium we have. So I’m pretty excited about this new film: Fair Game will document the Valerie Plame affair.

It’s a story that truly deserves to be immortalised on celluloid, providing an astonishing insight into the depth of iniquity reached by the Bush administration and the ruthless power of a corrupt political machine.

Directed by Doug Liman, who made The Bourne Identity, Swingers and Go, it also stars two of my favourite actors, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, and is due for release some time in 2010.

Sandel manages to make his analysis accessible while instructive; as one listener wrote on twitter: “Listening to podcasts of Sandel’s Reith lectures on way to work is like taking my brain to the gym”.

You can listen to all four of the lectures on the BBC iplayer.

Some highlights here:

For three decades, the governing philosophy of the United States and Britain was defined by the faith that markets are the primary instrument for achieving the public good. The financial crisis has put this faith in question.. The era of market triumphalism has come to an end. But we have yet to find our way to a new governing philosophy. Even President Obama has yet to articulate one…”

As a governing philosophy… the task of correcting market failures is too humble and too narrow. Democratic governance is radically devalued if reduced to the role of handmaiden to the market economy. Democracy is about more than fixing and tweaking and nudging incentives to make markets work better…”

The flight from moral judgement and moral argument in politics predates the era of market triumphalism. It found expression – on both sides of the Atlantic – beginning in the 1950s and 60s, partly as a reaction against fascist and communist ideologies, and partly as an attempt to spare politics from becoming embroiled in religious strife. And it also reflected a growing faith in economics as a value-neutral science.”

Bomb disposal scenes are a surefire shortcut to suspense. Doom-laden while at the same time full of hope; engrossing but maddeningly tense. The pared-down simplicity of the narrative – after all, there are only two possible endings when a bomb is within inches of your protagonist – is easy for audiences to grasp and even easier to hold onto. And the tiniest, momentary actions, the snip of a coloured wire, weigh heavy with potential catastrophe.

All this should help Kathryn Bigelow‘s new film The Hurt Locker, which follows an elite bomb disposal unit in Baghdad, escape the curse of unpopularity that’s beset Iraq-themed films thus far. Her refusal to wade into the ideology of the war could also make the film slip down a little easier with patriotic americans.

The film promises to be more than just a succession of mindless set pieces: Bigelow is an artist who studied painting before moving to Hollywood; she’s also an intriguing, provocative aesthete of violence, whose first short film in 1978 showed two men fighting, accompanied by an academic voiceover deconstructing the scene and its significance. That fascination with destruction as art – the “cinematic heart attack” – translates into incredible film-making. You can have a peek at her style – courtesy of the NY Times -  here.

And, obviously, in the trailer below.