All Slights Deserved

Recently I've been reading a book called Hiding the Elephant by Jim Steinmeyer. It's an engrossing history of the Golden Age of magic in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the key figures in the development of the artform, from John Nevil Maskelyne to Harry Houdini. The title derives from a spectacular illusion first performed by Houdini circa 1918, an illusion which in Houdini's hands turned out to be something of a damp squib. You see, although Houdini remains a legend for his feats as an escapologist he was by all accounts a lousy magician; he lacked the finesse to make illusions seem subtle and ingenious. It's not enough to simply present a trick, you have to make the audience believe in the impossible. Ingmar Bergman was fascinated by this subtle alchemy and saw an analogy between the illusionist's talent for challenging our rationality and his work as a stage and film director. The Magician was loosely inspired by G.K. Chesterton's play...