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We hear a lot about - from experts nowadays. Professor such-and-such or Dr Thingy, bristling with the authority their qualifications bestow upon them, academics pop up in the mainstream seemingly every other day offering their expertise. ‘Trust the experts!’ Yes, but did you know that experts often disagree with one another? Consumers of mainstream content might think such a contention sounds like heresy: if not experts then who do we trust? Though two decades have passed sin

Pastiche is a film genre that, when it works can be immensely satisfying, but when it doesn’t work . . . oh dear. Watching Nic Roeg’s 1988 movie Track 29 is a curious affair alright. When I say pastiche, I think that’s what it is: Twin Peaks meets any Nicolas Cage movie you care to mention. Or maybe it’s a serious attempt to portray the hollowness of the American Dream? Maybe it’s all of these things. Who can tell? Set in a kind of idealised mid-west and brimful of Americanis

Wallis Simpson aka the Duchess of Windsor – specifically her role in the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII – has always been presented in the same familiar way: the scheming twice-divorced American desired to be England’s queen and thus cast a spell over the playboy prince. That’s the official version of those long-ago events, albeit a rudimentary one. So it’s especially welcome that Anna Pasternak presents in The American Duchess a much more nuanced account of an affair that se