John Ware's Panorama in 2004, about the Today programme's reporting of what Dr David Kelly did or did not say about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is the magnum opus of this genre, but there are many examples.
I pictured Baghdad as Black Hawk Down's Mogadishu, all claustrophobic and high-contrast gun battles with desperate men in dark alleys, and mostly I heard Ride of the Valkyries, that grim killing opus in Apocalypse Now, retrofitted for our urban assaults and nighttime raids.
At the time, it was thought that Ruiz, who had been a heavy drinker and smoker for many years, would never complete his magnum opus, but he was aided by an operation for liver cancer.
So Landmarks began with the "Peat Glossary", and it ended with Abdal's world-spanning magnum opus.
Beefheart notoriously held his band under virtual house arrest in California in the 60s to make his magnum opus Trout Mask Replica – but at least they were somewhere warm.
Mr Piketty's book, which was published in French in 2013 and will be released in English in March 2014, self-consciously builds on the work of 19th-century thinkers; his title is an allusion to Marx's magnum opus.
Hayek's magnum opus, "The Constitution of Liberty", is a work in favour of, among other things, a constitution.
Perhaps, had he lived to see it, he might have chosen a copy of the magnum opus by his protégé, Marcel Proust, whose protagonist, the aesthete Charles Swann, is modelled partly on Ephrussi himself.At any rate, surely not his netsuke.
One of these, "Dementia 13", his youthful axe-murder opus, is referred to in "Tetro" when his protagonist arrives at a prize ceremony carrying an axe.Tetro (Vincent Gallo), whose real name is Angelo, is not fond of fame.
In the Mexican desert the drug trade seems to involve everyone, from politicians and the army down; the army is said to sell on half the marijuana it is supposed to burn.Towards the end of his opus, Mr Shoumatoff becomes strangely obsessed with the paintings of pink and purple coyotes that fill the cheaper art galleries in Santa Fe, in New Mexico.
His new magnum opus, "How Music Works", makes this clear.
