LEONARD COHEN

Thanks For The Dance

COLUMBIA

UNLIKE most people, or so it seemed from the film’s reviews, I emerged from a cinema showing Nick Broomfield’s Marianne & Leonard: Words Of Love earlier this year feeling rather less fond of Leonard Cohen than when I’d gone in. It was hard to ignore the fate of Marianne Ihlen’s son by a first husband, the novelist Axel Jensen, who had left her by the time she met Cohen on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960. Axel Jr, still just a baby when their affair began, was promptly sent back to Norway to be looked after by his grandmother. Later she brought him back to the community of artists on