On a whim, we went to see Woody Allen’s latest film last night — and enjoyed it immensely. The trailer doesn’t do it justice: it’s clever, witty, subtle and occasionally outrageously funny. And it has a lovely sting in the tail. In some ways, it feels like a return to Allen at the top of his 1970s form. The only thing that’s changed is that instead of Allen himself playing the angst-ridden intellectual who can’t quite manage a full-on relationship with a sexy woman, we have Owen Wilson, broken nose and all, playing that role as Gil Pender, a successful hack screenwriter who really wants to be a great novelist. But here’s the weird thing: Wilson sounds and acts exactly like Allen.

The film also revealed how unobservant I am. At one stage there’s a scene in which the main characters are in the Rodin museum listening to a French guide expounding on the sculptor’s life. As I watched, I thought: there’s something very familiar about that guide. I’m sure I’ve seen her somewhere before. It was only afterwards that I realised she is Carla Bruni, now France’s First Lady. Which left me marvelling at Allen’s cunning: what a way to ensure that filming in Paris is free from hassling by officialdom.

We watched it in a Cambridge cinema with an audience that clearly got the literary jokes: the wonderful send-up of Hemingway (brilliantly played by Corey Stoll), for example. Or the lovely joke about Bunuel in which the Allen figure gives the great director a suggestion for the plot of his most famous film — and Bunuel doesn’t get it! Adrien Brody’s portrayal of Salvador Dali at full throttle is side-splittingly funny. But in some places the film also gets serious things right: for example, the way Kathy Bates captures Gertrude Stein’s rock-solid dependability.

I left, still grinning at the lovely closing twist and making two resolutions: (a) to have a few days in Paris this Autumn; and (b) to read Gertrude Stein.

In his New Yorker review, David Denby describes the film as

a gently rapt fable, caressed with wonderment. Gil is a stumbling contemporary neurotic thrown in among artists with seemingly dauntless strength. It’s his trip, but it’s Allen’s, too—a dream curated by the fan of great musicians and writers, the culture-mad student, always renewing the pantheon.

He’s right. My verdict: unmissable.

From an email circulating on the Net. Thanks to Douglas for forwarding it.

On Christopher Wren’s tomb in his greatest building, St Paul’s Cathedral in London, is this Latin inscription. Translated, it means: “If you require a monument, look around.”

Much the same might be said for Steve Jobs and the iPad.

Yesterday was the centenary of the birth of Flann O’Brien, aka Brian O’Nolan, aka the author of the great post-modern novel, At Swim Two Birds, and (as Myles na gCopaleen) of the Cruskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times. To my gratified astonishment, Official Ireland, having done its best over the years of his life to belittle and ignore him, finally did the decent thing and put him on a commemorative stamp. And, in a very nice touch, the drawing of him was done by his brother, Michael.

I write with feeling on this matter. During my childhood in the 1950s, O’Brien wrote an astonishingly anarchic column for the Irish Times, then the eccentric house-organ of the Protestant ascendancy, edited by a gifted oddball named R.M. Smyllie, who had earned the undying hostility of the Catholic hierarchy because (a) he edited a Protestant newspaper, and (b) had strongly opposed General Franco, the Fascist dictator beloved of all Irish bishops. Since I grew up in a fervently Catholic household, the Irish Times was regarded as the spawn of the devil, and a copy of the paper never crossed the threshold. (Our newspaper fare was the Irish Press, the organ of Fianna Fail and the de Valera family, and the Irish Catholic, a devotional publication of stupefying piety.) But every so often I would pick up a snatch of conversation about this guy Myles na gCopaleen — literally “Myles of the Little Horses” — and wonder what the fuss was about. I determined that, one day, I would find out.

Eventually, when I was sixteen I saved up enough money to go to Dublin for a few days (staying with a relative, who lived in Ballsbridge and was deemed sufficiently strict to be able to keep an eye on me). On the first morning she inquired brightly whether I had plans for the day, and beamed approvingly when I told her that I was hoping to visit the National Library, then next to Leinster House in Kildare Street. So I took the bus down to Stephen’s Green and made my way to the Library, past a glowering custodian, lurking like the basilisk in his cave. Once inside, I discovered that I had lowered the average age of the readers by at least four decades. Undeterred, I requested back numbers of the Irish Times, which arrived, as I recall, in huge bound volumes, and commenced to read my way through the Cruskeen Lawn columns.

Coming to Myles for the first time, I found him intoxicatingly funny, which is how I came unstuck. One column in particular (I think it was one where he had put the image of a finger pointing at the Leading Article which ran alongside, the argument of which he then proceeded to ridicule) was so hilarious that I was racked by hysterical laughter. And then I suddenly noticed other readers looking disapprovingly at me, and the duty librarian over by the door talking grimly to the custodian and pointing at me. He advanced menacingly and said “We don’t want your sort here, sonny. This is a serious place. Out with yer!”. Or words to that effect.

I’ve loved Flann O’Brien’s work ever since that day. His newspaper did him proud on his centenary, with a story about the new stamp, a reprint of one of his nicest columns (in which he discusses the importance of the word “supposed” in Irish daily life) and some letters from readers drawing learned attention to his various exploits.

A few days ago I blogged about the implications of Facebook’s latest intrusions into the lives of its users. The more I looked at the idea of “frictionless sharing” the more outrageous it seems. So it was refreshing to come on this succinct dissection of the initiative by Jeff Sonderman which makes the point more cogently than I did.

Facebook spent years making it easier for us to share by building its network and placing “Like” buttons across the Web. Its latest idea goes much further, turning sharing into a thoughtless process in which everything we read, watch or listen to is shared with our friends automatically.

Encouraging sharing is great. Making sharing easier is even better. But this is much more than that. What Facebook has done is change the definition of “sharing.” It’s the difference between telling a friend about something that happened to you today and opening your entire diary.

Yep. Jeff points out that a number of news organisations (including the Guardian group, for which I write) are careering headlong down this path by ‘partnering’ with Facebook in its latest wheeze. Which brings to mind Winston Churchill’s wonderful definition of appeasement as “being nice to a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last”.

Jeff goes on to list a number of reasons why this idea of frictionless sharing is not only fatuous, but also cynically manipulative, in that it benefits only Facebook while purporting to be useful to its eager sharecroppers.

The fact that people choose to keep most things private places significance on what they choose to share. If everything is shared automatically, nothing has significance.

If a woman reads a Yahoo News story about breast cancer and that fact is automatically noted in her Facebook activity, what are her friends to make of that? Does she have cancer? Does she have a friend with cancer? Perhaps a colleague was quoted in the article. Maybe she accidentally clicked on the wrong link.

Facebook is presenting this information with no context. In the absence of context, people make assumptions.

Can anyone in the new Facebook world read about personal health, relationship advice, personal finance or gay rights without their acquaintances speculating why? In other cases readers could be embarrassed by clicking on a Kim Kardashian photo gallery, a list of crude jokes, or anything else that some people may find distasteful.