Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

A Single Man
Director: Tom Ford

Invictus
Director: Clint Eastwood

Edge of Darkness
Director: Martin Campbell

Colin Firth has never shown such gravitas as in A Single Man, adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel by fashion designer turned director Tom Ford. As Los Angeles English professor George Falconer, whose long-time partner Jim (Matthew Goode) has died in a car crash, Firth exudes the pent-up frustration of abandonment and loneliness – emotions he cannot for the most part express to his all-American neighbours and faculty colleagues. While his community is gripped by the Cuban missile crisis – the film is set over one day: November 30 1962 – for George, the bombs have already gone off. He has been wasted away by the impact of the accident, his half-life state depleting so rapidly that he chooses this day to buy bullets for Jim’s old service revolver and commit suicide.

Austerity Britain 1951-56 by David Kynaston
Bloomsbury, £25

Planning and control were the catch phrases of the 1950s as Britain slowly began to recover from the devastation wreaked by the Second World War. Rationing continued until 1954 and, when Winston Churchill was told what constituted the weekly food ration, he assumed it was for a single meal rather than for the whole week, beautifully illustrating the prevalence of class within a society undergoing profound change.

Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather
Yale University Press, £25

Even those of us who harbour unrequited longings for the commanding heights of the economy to be brought under workers’ control without compensation (except in cases of proven need) may feel a guilty frisson of something like admiration for the sheer energy of mercantile capitalism. For those who have not experienced this sinful emotion, I recommend this extraordinary book by an author who has ensured my eternal enmity by being impossibly good looking, about 25 years old, a qualified barrister and a former Kennedy scholar.

Thomas Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction by Fergus Kerr
Oxford University Press, £7.99

Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction by Eric H Cline
Oxford University Press, £7.99

The Oxford University Press series of Very Short Introductions are the Twitter of academic literature. An eclectic pocket-size collection, each fewer than 200 pages, covering any subject a university don might fancy writing about. I’ve just read one, eye-catchingly entitled Nothing, which turned out to be a sprint through particle physics.

A Prophet
Director: Jacques Audiard

The Boys Are Back
Director: Scott Hicks

Breathless
Director: Yang Ik-june

It’s a good bet that the most enthusiastically reviewed new film of 2010 will turn out to be Jacques Audiard’s prison drama A Prophet. It was many critics’ choice as the cream of the crop after premiering to near-universal acclaim at Cannes last May. One scribe perceived an allegory for the life of the prophet Mohammed, another interpreted its plot, whereby greenhorn Malik (Tahar Rahim) learns the ropes – and plays off various factions against each other to his own ultimate benefit over the course of a six-year sentence – as a commentary upon “the demographic shifts in French society” since 1959.

Mo
Channel 4

Mad Men
BBC 4

The post-war years were littered with Labour heavyweights from the likes of Clement Atlee, Ernie Bevin, Nye Bevan and Herbert Morrison to Harold Wilson, Michael Foot, Jim Callaghan and Tony Crosland. All of them were political giants. But not so in more recent years, where you would be pushed to name more than a handful who will one day become the subject of fat biographies.