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“... finds a kind of truth in film fakery, even if she initially refuses to consider the film’s young star, Manon Lenoir (a name very close to that of the actress playing her, Manon Clavel), as any sort of reincarnation of Sarah. And we move from truth in falsehood to the idea of performance in truth, as relations between Fabienne and Lumir reach the point ...”

“... of beautiful trees; and then, again, the police at the crime scene. The third murder, that of a young boy, is announced by his smiling at the person he doesn’t know is about to kill him. That’s all we see until the police occupy the next shot.Who is it that we don’t see in these instances? This is where we arrive at the question belonging to ...”

“... fluency and suggestiveness. Only a few hours elapse in the narrative. Nathan Zuckerman, the young author of some well-received short stories, spends an evening, night and morning at the New England home of a reclusive elder writer he esteems, E.I. Lonoff. The dates and other details of Nathan’s career tally with Roth’s own. Lonoff’s speciality has ...”

“... I don’t find that my children want to hear what things were like when I was young. Publishers, who are sometimes also parents, must find that their families don’t want to listen to them either, and yet they are right in thinking that childhood reminiscences make seductive books. Michael Schmidt was brought up in Mexico, and in his ‘not strictly autobiographical novel’, The Colonist, he turns with brilliant and painful concentration to his early years ...”

“... to work hard here. For Julia Phillips, and for everyone else, she says, ‘who thought they were young, decadent and rich in the Seventies’, the Seventies were the Eagles song ‘Life in the Fast Lane’, and a style modelled on the song. ‘The Seventies ... pot ’n’ coke’n’ incense,’ she also says; like the Sixties only higher. Phillips’s ...”

“... In the old times, long before the birth of the Irish Free State, a young woman called Brigid McLaughlin went down from Derry to work in southern Donegal. Her job was to look after two children, a girl and a boy, aged nine and seven, orphans. ‘The children were beautiful,’ we are told, ‘especially the girl. She was dark, the boy was fair ...”

“... blurbs, and not only from other writers. He figures on Granta’s list of the ‘Twenty Best Young American Novelists’. The Spokanes were ‘a salmon tribe before they put those dams on the river’, fisherfolk living in settled villages. Most of Alexie’s work is set on their reservation in eastern Washington State, and what’s most alive in that ...”

“... of the films showing at the London Film Festival later this month is The Quiet American, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, directed by Philip Noyce, and based on Graham Greene’s novel. (It isn’t the first time the book’s been adapted for the screen: Mankiewicz made a version in 1958 which Greene, who anyway tended to have a very low opinion of ...”

“... concept of Kingship – and by his very appearance. The image of the hero in Western civilisation, young, blond, with a beauty whose hint of effeminacy is constantly belied by his actions, derives from the representations of Alexander which have come down to us from Antiquity. War was an extension of his personality: for him it was not an instrument of policy ...”

“... also means (and probably is the origin of) ‘swindle’. Visiting Venice, Sebald thinks two young men may be following him. ‘The fear passed across my mind that these two men who were looking at me now had already crossed my path more than once since my arrival.’ He takes off for Verona, where he sees (or thinks he sees) the same men again: I ...”

“... the trappings of the hardened old warhorse you could still see traces of the impetuous young thoroughbred, who had enchanted Leiris and others a quarter of a century before.’ Well, yes. Most of us were easier to take when young, especially if we were beautiful, energetic, bright and eagerly ambitious, as Sonia ...”

“... hall above the pub and there’s a lot of shouting. Later, as we are getting into the car, Gary, a young man crippled with arthritis, calls out to A. from the snooker hall. She knows him and asks if it was him that was doing the shouting. ‘Yes,’ he says proudly. ‘You shouldn’t.’ ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Because,’ I put in weakly, ‘it’s a free ...”

“... though he found Lindbergh ‘as nice as can be’. He described him as ‘like a bright, young chauffeur’. Ludovic Kennedy draws attention to a disagreeable side of Lindbergh’s character: a taste for aggressive practical jokes. But he was fearless, and an inspired mechanic. When he took off at dawn on 20 May 1927 for his historic flight across ...”

“... Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall. The riot of hair came later, in the 1970s, the period after the epochal move out of Belfast down to Glanmore in Wicklow, the Noddy Holder whiskers, the period of ‘Exposure’, of ...”

“... by an old man, inspired by Hrabal’s Uncle Pepin, a top-gallant, one might say, addressing his ‘young ladies’. It was written in the 1950s and first published in 1964, as Hrabal’s second book in print. Michael Henry Heim’s English translation appeared in 1995, when Hrabal was 81. Old book? New book? ...”