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“... about the gap it leaps over. Patricia Arquette, as the affectionate hard-up single mother of two young children, has decided to go to college and improve her job prospects. ‘Life is expensive,’ she tells the children. One day she takes her son Mason with her to class and introduces him to her professor (Marco Perella), an obnoxious fellow in love with ...”

“... with her. The play he is currently directing is Death of a Salesman, and his gimmick is to have young actors take the roles of older people – because they will, if they don’t die first, become older people, and the audience is to feel this in the performance. Nice idea, but Cotard has become a little obsessive about it. Before his wife (Catherine ...”

“... of the bad guys. These doings start with a man placing the grub in a capsule and feeding it to a young woman whose name we later learn is Kris, wonderfully played by Amy Seimetz. Seimetz has the ability (aided by Carruth’s camera no doubt) to look different in almost every scene while remaining manifestly the same person: a sort of visual portrait of what ...”

“... A good thing too, we might think, but this is not the right reaction. The implication is that the young men and women of Belfast have strayed from the church’s wisdom, and this reading is confirmed by an extraordinary, brightly lit shot of Johnny suddenly remembering the famous passage from 1 Corinthians – ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of ...”

“... and could even be got to do a little work. At a wake in Volver a crowd of women hover round a young woman, who is disturbed by the sheer clustering energy of this traditional presence. A high-angle shot makes them look like a tight geometrical pattern, or a wheel, society as a repetitive machine. For a moment what flickers here is the shade not of Buñuel ...”

“... Haiti. The women get less and less casual about their casual affairs, and one of their young men is killed for a reason that has nothing to do with them, and everything to do with abuses of power by the government and its friends. The women don’t know the reason, and therefore don’t know it is unrelated to them; and we are invited to make all ...”

“... killings, already the subject of several books, including one by John Hersey published in 1968. A young cop fires at a looter, and defends himself not on the grounds that the victim was armed or even that he could have been, but that he might have done something else unlawful during the rioting. The victim later dies, and we think this may be an important ...”

“... that Senator Edward Kennedy was again thinking of running for the Democratic nomination. A young reporter had the idea of asking ex-President Nixon for his views on this development. ‘If Teddy Kennedy is serious,’ Nixon is alleged to have replied, ‘then the first thing he should do is lose thirty pounds.’ In a country where Presidential ...”

“... the writers we read, we do not believe such things about relative strangers – that beautiful young man at the gym, that horrible troll there – and neither, as a rule, do we believe them about celebrities. We believe from reading him that Oscar Wilde – in person – was both superficial and profound. Or we believe that Roland Barthes in person ...”

“... aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination. Michael Collie, the more severe of Borrow’s new biographers, notes the instructions Borrow’s publisher gave him when he was writing The Bible in Spain: he was told to report his remarkable achievements, experiences and skills ‘in a natural manner, as if ...”

“... This German novel has waited nearly forty years for its English translator. Michael Hofmann fell in love the moment the Good Fairy told him about it, and set out to liberate it from the thorn hedge of neglect. The Good Fairy, in this case, was a Berlin bookseller ‘who First recommended Koeppen’. Wolfgang Koeppen is 86 ...”

“... moment, represents the voice of ‘youth’ is peculiar enough. REM’s lead singer and lyricist, Michael Stipe, is knocking on 40; other members of the group are older (one, the percussionist Bill Berry, has taken early retirement, on grounds of advanced age and poor health). Stipe is as close in age to Roger Scruton as to Liam Gallagher and, on photographic ...”

“... The war is a long way back and young people take little interest in it, or in the feel of what was being said and written at the time. Lawrence, Yeats and Eliot go marching on, attracting obedient attention from each new generation of students, but this form of academic perpetuity does not extend to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour ...”

“... The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth from childhood to manhood, and the father’s from early to late middle age: each poem denotes some new phase, and usually low point, in the relationship ...”

“... and fascinating claim, with radical implications for the historiography of the period. Michael Thompson has had something of the same intuition about Victorian society, and it is one of several themes in his new book which makes this much more than the undergraduate or A-level toolkit which it might appear to be. We know a great deal about the ...”