Newsnight Review

Newsnight Review discussion of climate change and the arts is available for a few more days on this link. We discussed apocalyptic movies (2012 and The Road), the eARTh exhibition at the Royal Academy, and the writing of wild nature, focusing on Sara Wheeler's book about visiting the Arctic. I thought - though didn't have time to say so on air - that the movie of The Road was magnificent (though not really about climate change, more about family and saying goodbye). It was actually better than the book: Cormac McCarthy's prose can sometimes be overblown ("the ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be" - hm). Often the way that the best films are made from the second-best books.