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“... as a kind of prelude to his own sentimental education, the story of a love affair, that of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy, which took place around the time of his birth. He then picks up his own later life in Paris, and his desperate, teenage passion for Swann and Odette’s daughter (when the love affair ended, they felt it was time to get ...”

“... print into plays and films almost since he was born in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920. Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, José Ferrer, Tony Randall and many others have brought him to some sort of audio or audio-visual life, but the relatively recent personifications by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet dominate most memories. None of ...”

“... turn safely to the detective who now makes his appearance. This is a retired policeman played by Charles Vanel, and said to be the model for Peter Falk’s Columbo: he smokes a small cigar perpetually, pretends not to understand half of what he hears, and has a habit of popping up magically everywhere. He wears a dark old woollen coat, though, instead of the ...”

“... who also shot Polanski’s The Pianist, as well as Taylor Hackford’s glossy biography of Ray Charles. This is important, because the movie is mostly about the way it looks. It’s meant to be a political thriller – based on Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost (the film has that title in the UK) – but it feels as if the writer went home halfway ...”

“... Having had much cause to mention Charles Saatchi in my Guardian column over the past five years, I was pleased when this most secretive of men finally agreed to meet me around the time of the opening of his new private museum. I found, more to other people’s surprise than my own, that he was a nice enough chap, a Guardian reader no less ...”

“... most people, who have never thought of making a moral distinction between toys and scale models, Charles Eames’s schoolmasterly voiceover at the beginning of Toccata for Toy Trains (1957), sets off a chain of ideas. Real toys, model toys, toy toys, toy models, real models, each a slightly different concept, reverberate in the mind like one of ...”

“... of them with her calm, uncreased prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul Says, she converts ...”

“... Florentine church of San Pier Maggiore was bought by the National Gallery in 1857, the director, Charles Eastlake, didn’t really know what to do with it. The altarpiece, painted by Jacopo di Cione and his workshop in the early 1370s, is one of the biggest made in the 14th century and, even though it had been dismantled after the church was destroyed in the ...”

“... was always the thing. The mode kept remembering what it was ostensibly getting rid of. Charles Portis’s funny and violent novel True Grit (1968) is the perfect pastoral of the ungallant west. It presents a world mockingly simplified to its extreme elements, as if the western’s dream of a time before the law brought order and civilisation to a ...”

“... scenes. Thus both artists depicted the Queen of Sheba kneeling in recognition before the wood from which the True Cross would be made, but Piero added her subsequent meeting with Solomon, and he alone showed Constantine’s dream and his victory over Maxentius. Ginzburg thinks that the inclusion of these episodes implies a change of plan on the part ...”

“... Brecht, where ten years of exile have left their mark, and beneath 5 copies of file 100-190707, Charles Laughton returning to the stage as Galileo, enters an elevator. On the other hand, of my name with a hyphen between Eugene and Friedrich the Bureau has no record. Nay rather, like the name of a certain Frenchman to whom ...”

“... Andrew Maunder’s introduction to his new edition of Ellen Wood’s chronicle of scandalous goings-on among the Victorian middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the most famous unread works in the English language’. Very possibly. Yet it was spectacularly successful in its day, and its popularity has turned out to be more durable than that of most publishing sensations ...”

“... corruption. This line of thought actually recurs, I’m sure without any allusive intent, in Larry Charles’s The Dictator, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as the evil Oriental Admiral General Aladeen. An eager American dissident says the police in her country are fascists. ‘Yes,’ our hero says, ‘but not in a good way.’ Still, in spite of the echo, there ...”

“... legs to be broken), and released early because of his health. He told his story to his lawyer, Charles Brandt, who wrote the book on which the movie is based, I Heard You Paint Houses (2004). The phrase is supposed to have been among the first words Hoffa said to Sheeran when they met on the phone. Formally the film is Sheeran’s autobiography. He speaks ...”

“... On 15 August​ 1737 Samuel Wood was working in a windmill on the Isle of Dogs, when a rope tied around his wrist became caught in the gear wheels. The gigantic brake-wheel pulled him into the mechanism, tearing off his right arm. Wood staggered a short distance before collapsing ...”