Lindsay Anderson spent his time insulting the world, but at least he never insulted himself.. Up in the Air by Derek Jarman (Vintage, pounds 8.99) First collection of the film-maker's scripts includes Akentaten, Neutron and Sod 'Em. With Nails, Film Diaries of Richard E Grant (Picador, pounds 16.99) Grant's diaries of the 10 years spent in Hollywood after Withnail and I is a winsome collection of star-studded anecdotes (visiting sex shops with Liz Hurley, escorting Sandra Bernhardt to Madonna's place) and grumpy reflections on not being recognised in obscure airports: "nothing works...my luggage is lost...people look as ugly as Belgians..." Poor boy. Past Imperfect. History According to the Movies ed Mark C Carnes (Cassell, pounds 20)Relationship between great historical events and their interpretation on film.. It is perfectly proper that this astonishing book should be reviewed by a writer of traditional English prose who lives in the bowels of rural Wales, prefers to be in bed by 11 and seldom meets an artist from one literary festival to the next.

A more metropolitan critic might not be quite so astounded by the unending passion of cultural life in St Petersburg, as presented for us here by an ebullient and affectionate son of the city. A New Yorker, especially, might feel perfectly at home with it all, if only because a stream of prodigious emigre talent has created a second St Petersburg over there, so that Stravinsky, Balanchine, Prokofiev, Nabokov, Brodsky, Horovitz, Yascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Solomon Volkov and all have come to seem more or less home-grown. But for a bourgeois European provincial like me, it is all a marvel and everything about the book excited me. Even its translation from the original Russian, undertaken by somebody whose first language was evidently not English, sometimes has an exotic tang to it; while the story itself is told with such love and intimate knowledge, is so surging with marvellous characters, and with historical episodes tragic and inspiring, that as I read it over my cocoa of an evening, it quite took my breath away. Such is the way of the Russians, all blood and firebird. Mr Volkov is describing for us what he likes to call the St Petersburg "mythos" - likes it so much, in fact, that he uses the word several hundred times in the course of the book.

This legend Volkov sees fostered by the deliberate isolation of the city, away in the cold northern marshes, by the classical grace of its architecture and by the will of the successive despots who ruled it: but he sees it enacted above all by its writers, dancers, artists and musicians, starting with Pushkin, ending with Akhmatova, and never without a genius in between .It was Pushkin, with his seminal poem ''The Bronze Horseman'', who first recognised St Petersburg to be the very epitome of conflict between the State and the individual - Peter the Great had built the place with slave labour, killing at least 100,000 in the process - and down the generations the city's artists endlessly fought the fight against tsars as against commissars. What a roster of towering names - Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Rimsky- Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rachmaninoff, Blok, Benois, Diaghilev, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich! What risks they ran, what loves they loved, what thrilling lives they led! What schools and counter-schools they formed, now as rivals, now as clandestine allies - acmeists and symbolists and maximalists and suprematists,declaiming their poems in the cellar of The Stray Dog, bursting into tears at the ends of symphonies! it makes the heart sing to read about them.But it could be dangerous and depressing, and often the artistic life was pursued through a kind of twilight - the famous white light of the St Petersburg night. Volkov subtly evokes the disturbing ambivalences that always linked Art and State in this city, whether as St Petersburg under the tsars, Petersburg under the Bolsheviks or Leningrad under the Stalinists.The tsars were patrons as well as censors: Nicholas I called Pushkin "the wisest man in Russia''. The Communists cynically recognised the power of art: celebrated practitioners painted posters for them, decorated propaganda plates, made films and danced. Many an artist felt it necessary to co- operate with despotism, if only to give art a chance; many more sacrificed their careers, their liberty and even their lives rather than compromise their integrity.In the long term, of course, art always wins: in the short term, as Brodsky once told his boorish interrogators, they had all the power of the KGB behind them, he had only ''half a room and a typewriter''. Nevertheless, through the worst days of Stalin's Great Terror and the Cold War, the artists of Leningrad somehow managed to keep the flame alive, in texts too subtle for bureaucrats to grasp, in coded historical allusions, in the underground distribution system that was samizdat, and now and then in gestures of glorious defiance.In 1948 the officially denounced Fifth Symphony of Shostakovich was performed in Leningrad to the tumultuous applause of an audience that heard it as a declaration of personal liberty: the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, in an impulse that might well have cost him his life, seized the score and held it high above his head in a deliberate cock of the snook at tyranny at all times and in all places, but especially in St Petersburg.For the city's intellectuals always thought of it as St Petersburg or, more often, simply as "Piter".