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“... She’s played by Catherine Deneuve, who co-stars with Juliette Binoche. The only other name on the list is, as it has to be, that of the diva to end all divas, Greta Garbo – ‘G.G.’ to her closest associates. With Garbo, the process of distillation out of which stars are made reached a limit so absolute that hardly anything remains by way of ...”

“... a spitter – in other words, a ‘gentleman of the old Virginia school’. His children kept pet billy goats and played tennis and squash on their own courts. Nancy’s older sister Irene was the more celebrated beauty – she was the original Gibson Girl – but Nancy was fiercer (she once killed a moccasin snake with her riding crop). The Langhorne ...”

“... seems to have been a bus driver in Weybridge first mentioned as Tom Palmer: ‘I think that is his name,’ Forster says, with wise caution, since he was actually called Arthur Barnet, and had a wife called Bess. (In his biography Furbank was obliged to call him Arthur B–– and her Madge; Wendy Moffat sets the record straight.) He was mixed-race (‘In his ...”

“... made a devilishly catchy new sound out of country dash and bluesy holler and after-hours leer. The name of the studio was Sun: flash, heat, escaping light. Ra worship in this other Memphis. Teenage culture’s own A-bomb, with so much fallout to come. It’s debatable whether those first recordings can now contain all the weight they’ve been made to ...”

“... of amusing or abject trash. Whatever genre he tried, he seemed to be working at a role that had no name: critic, prophet, consoler, moral historian. His first book, omitted from the Library of America edition of his work, was a volume of lyrics, Permit Me Voyage, its title drawn from a line by Hart Crane with a tougher edge than the borrowing may indicate; an ...”

“... stretch to the ‘H’. Rather embarrassed for her, that she can’t pick who I am, I slip her my name of the day. I claim I’m an Indian brave. I claim I’m Sir Launcelot. I claim I’m the parish priest and she doesn’t quibble. I give her a blessing; she says: ‘Thank you, Father.’I sit on the stairs, which are steep, box-like, dark. I think I am ...”

“... have to play in unison: they can inhabit different time zones. Kubrick knows this as well as Billy Wilder did in Sunset Boulevard or Alain Resnais did in Last Year at Marienbad. In Killer’s Kiss, Kubrick has his heroine narrate her whole miserable life story over an image which simply shows a solitary ballet dancer in performance – she is the ...”

“... It was strange to doubly strange. The Shire isn’t really called the Shire, but Sûza. Merry’s name is really Kalimac. And hobbits were neither hobbits nor halflings, strictly speaking: ‘In the Westron the word used, when this people was referred to at all, was banakil, “halfling”. But at this date the folk of the Shire and of Bree used the word ...”

“... roof dominates the skyline, the visitor gets the impression the docks have been freshly bombed. Billy Hardie was there at the end of fishing, a veteran of the Cod War and the glory days before. He was a trawler skipper then – he still captains a boat, now doing survey work – and he’s done well out of it, with a large, comfortable house in the ...”

“... tours. Seaside holidays boomed. ‘The late Forties marked the peak of the Victorian resorts.’ Billy Butlin, who had invented the holiday camp and had opened two in the late Thirties, had provided three further camps for service personnel during the war, and had bought them back from the Government afterwards. In 1947 about half a million people flocked to ...”

“... know the truth.’ When I asked where he got his news, the answer was Yahoo. Robert’s companion, Billy, who was pretty hammered and had been quiet until now, weighed in with an aphorism: ‘I vote Republican to preserve my poverty and integrity!’ Somehow the name of Trump’s supreme court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, came ...”

“... of God: ‘He sees God in every thing, and he sees every thing in God.’ I read his awful name, emblazon’d high With golden letters on th’illumined sky; Nor less the mystic characters I see Wrought in each flower, inscrib’d in every tree; In every leaf that trembles to the breeze I hear the voice of GOD among the trees … A.O. Lovejoy argued ...”

“... from us to the land. As we left the boat at Inisheer I could hear people whispering Seamus’s name, and he is very good with that, saying hello to people. We climbed into a pony and trap at the pier and were soon off round the island. The man driving the vehicle was the very picture of robust outdoor health, and Seamus took pleasure, he said, in the way ...”

“... about her old man that perhaps she never knew herself. For example, his grandmother’s maiden name (Ernst). I knew he entered UFA and swept the cutting-room floor. I talked to the son he left behind in Germany shortly after conceiving him. Nice old buffer, early sixties, retired bank clerk, prisoner of war in Norfolk, England, 1942-46, perfect ...”

“... gossip columnists or herself. Her perfectionist mother – an American actress with the stage name Sara Sothern – worried excessively about her daughter’s appearance. During the making of National Velvet when Taylor was twelve, Sara stopped the filming of one scene, convinced that her daughter’s hand looked fat.When, in the 1980s, Joan Rivers made ...”