Search Results

“... of Craig being funny brings to mind the monster doing ‘Putting on the Ritz’ in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, and he isn’t funny in Skyfall. But he does make a grim gag now and again – returning from his supposed grave he says he has been ‘enjoying death’ – he is less righteous, he is damaged, and he thinks. He is – what do you call ...”

“... The narrator looks at a photo left there, and thinks it may represent ‘one of the other dead young men’. A few pages later, recalling his seemingly interminable early sexual adventures, he says: ‘I suppose most of them are dead now, all those young bodies I touched and undressed and tucked in when they fell ...”

“... to his boy. ‘Dick!’ ‘I have come to sit with you for a bit, father.’ (It is the gay, young, careless voice.) Dick turns out to be a sensible and good-humoured phantom, recommending brisk activity as a remedy for grief. He advises his father to take up painting again – ‘your picture of those three Graces’ – and not give up his ...”

“... out of which the building had triumphantly emerged showed the inevitable limitations of a young architect, leaving his drawing board and sketchbook for reality. It was Frank Newby, a superb (and generous) engineer, who made the untried concept of the lavishly glazed building actually work; it was the ...”

“... of storytelling in this novel has to do with the death of a dog. Three characters are involved: Michael Luxton, a taciturn dairy farmer; Jack, his elder son, aged 26; and Tom, his much younger son, approaching his 18th birthday. The old sick dog, named Luke, was originally just a farm dog, then for many years Jack’s close companion, but now more recently ...”

“... recommending simple exposition of Christian doctrine: I remember Dürer saying that when he was young he liked elaborate and very variegated pictures and that he much enjoyed looking at these qualities in his own pictures. Later, when older, he began to contemplate Nature ... and realised simplicity was the highest beauty of art. 4. Letter of 1555 ...”

“... rather than the beneficiaries of social change, by the working class rather than the thrusting young professionals. Yet in this economic twilight, not even the fortunate can afford to be sanguine about the future of civility in public places. If anxiety about crime is a displaced expression of a more general historical pessimism about the future of civic ...”

“... they have been beaten up? One of Fleur de Lys’s specialities is plastic surgery which converts young women into copies of contemporary actresses, Lana Turner, Veronica Lake and others, so that the clients can screw celebrity simulacra. What the film gives us is better than that: an appearance which is the reality. Kim Basinger looks just like Kim ...”

“... in Jojo Rabbit is a strangely theoretical thing. When Johannes, still an eager young Nazi, begins a fraught friendship with the Jewish girl his mother is hiding, he asks her to draw for him the place where Jews live. She draws a picture of his head, and writes the word Dummkopf underneath. She is right. As Sartre said long ago, the Jews of ...”

“... to. She decides to punish him by embarrassing him. She will wear a red dress to a ball where all young ladies are supposed to wear white. Dillard, stubborn in his way, takes her to the ball, forces her stay longer than she wants to and to dance emphatically round the floor with him, making them the only persons still moving in a shocked staring crowd. Then ...”

“... though we keep suspecting him we don’t suspect him for long, and we are right not to. Nick has a young mistress, his marriage was falling apart, he drinks too much, and he is still behaving in a way that doesn’t endear him to anyone, but he isn’t a murderer. Cary Grant wasn’t planning to murder Joan Fontaine either, although Hitchcock manages not to ...”

“... who looks like a longer, leaner version of Groucho Marx, reports. He can see the novel, a young woman, can’t quite see her face. Then she moves and he sees it’s Sullavan. He tells Stewart the woman is good-looking, and resembles Sullavan – that is, Miss Novak from the shop. Stewarts gets impatient and wonders why Bressart is talking about Miss ...”

“... every contradictory aspect, that you keep forgetting what’s wrong with the writing) and a busy young intern (Evan Rachel Wood) who gets herself into all kinds of trouble. The very word ‘intern’ will give you a clue as to the kind of trouble this is, for her and for others, and the film rather clunkily underlines this suggestion – boys will be ...”

“... who have committed suicide – and elsewhere in the movie we see him taking calls from a desperate young man ready to do the same – and says he wants to end these needless deaths, to abolish the ubiquitous pressure towards guilt and hiding. What’s moving and powerful here is not the slightly saintly flavour of Milk’s stance – he must be as ambitious as ...”

“... that almost unravels the whole saga, or at least shows how close the saga came to unravelling, the young Nelson spots what he calls a ‘suspicious-looking vessel’ off the coast of Corsica. The boat contains Bonaparte, his mother, his sister and his three brothers, although of course Nelson can’t know this. He asks his senior officer for permission to sink ...”