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“... Fink, 1991); a toytown Fifties New York (The Hudsucker Proxy, 1993); and now a bleached-out, snow-driven Midwest, where the very names of places, for all their actual presence in the atlas, sound like a scrambled allegory: Fargo, North Dakota; Brainerd, Minnesota; Bismarck, North Dakota. What happens in these far-flung settings, this dream-America, as ...”

“... main characters should be mutually defining. Since both are fragmentary, definition is lost. The Snow Man is a first novel that displays a promising blend of technical competence and raw energy. In form, it is a curious hybrid: a thriller with a Lawrentian substructure. Christie, the heroine, not long married, newly pregnant, unhappy with the devitalising ...”

“... police cars, dark shapes behind torches and headlights, advance slowly through the thickly falling snow towards Johnny and Kathleen, is a kind of diagram of a world without charity in this sense, or a picture of the death of charity. ‘I know no other film image,’ Dai Vaughan says in his BFI Classics book on Odd Man Out, ‘which conveys such utter ...”

“... there a (fictional) man behind the moustache? Well, there is a director, who is also Branagh, and Michael Green, a thoughtful and inventive scriptwriter. They give shape and sense to a particular notion of Poirot. But it is Branagh’s acting that makes the notion work. I say this as a non-fan of his Shakespeare films (Hamlet, Henry V, Much Ado about ...”

“... In the morning hope flushes the city anew. I guess it was just that I always thought of snow at the wrong times and defeatism came    charging through the barricades. It always knew where to find me. Funny, few can now remember how water came in pails once, and sails were free for anyone who needed them for a boat. Ashbery is thinking of ...”

“... foxes, a deer such electrically gracile deer, a dog such a dog as Marc’s 1911 Dog Lying in the Snow, off-white in a jagged puddle of whiter snow under rocks and trees; the head resting thoughtfully, perhaps a little sadly, on the left forepaw; the long body tinged with buttery gold and edged and shadowed with violet and ...”

“... undeterred, and he sent for a new engineer, and he went on building. Four months later, with the snow already in deep piles on the streets, he was forced to call a halt. But when the first swallows arrived, so did Herr Bardach. We went on building. On a hot July day, the work was finally finished. But the money was finished too. Creditors came. Invoices ...”

“... he keeps telling us). A little girl talks to her mother at a lakeside cottage in a cold country, snow everywhere and a frozen lake nearby. The mother has had too much to drink and is about to have a little more. We have seen the place in long shot through the eyes of a man approaching it, and now we see him. He wears a plastic mask that makes him look like a ...”

“... of black flowers, you are driven by an endless wind from the north, I will sleep, tomorrow the snow and solitude will already cover me after your shoes …But one might as well read Celan, or perhaps merely something histrionic translated from the Spanish. One might read Bernhard: Birds blackened the winter passages of my loneliness and brought news of ...”

“... five hundred pages it aspires to the status of a grand social saga à la Margaret Drabble or C.P. Snow. Michael Jordan, sensitive and Jewish, has his first introduction to English mores at a boarding-school evacuated to the coast of North Devon. After the war he grows up to become a successful TV dramatist not unlike ...”

“... different. Logic’s necessity is more profound. It’s impossible for a contradiction like ‘Snow is white and snow is not white’ to be true, and this necessity seems absolute. ‘Laws of logic’ don’t function like laws of nature, keeping reality in line, since if they did we could ask why those laws could not be ...”

“... was of a fertile valley, with rolling fields and poplar trees in the foreground, and masses of snow-capped peaks in the distance. It was spectacular, he said, awesome. It must once have been rich; but now nobody went there – it took five or six hours to get there from Barcelona. It was more than five thousand feet above sea-level – and you could rent a ...”

“... cousin of the fog. It ought to be its antithesis but it isn’t. When we’re not in the snow or the fields or the forest, we are in a modernist castle, a place of unadorned galleries, corridors, rooms and courtyards that looks as if it was designed by De Chirico rather than any medieval mason, and it complements the fog because, as the movie keeps ...”

“... too: slow but never sluggish. Fontaine knows when to linger over a long walk through the snow, for example, and when to cut sharply from departure to arrival, leaving out a whole journey in a jeep. At one point the soldiers we have seen attacking Mathilde appear at the convent, and seem all set to ravage the place and the sisters again. Mathilde has ...”

“... He meets a policeman who tells him a story, and, since this is a film, we see and hear it. Snow falls. Williams is sitting on a swing in the playground, rocking slightly, and singing a song (‘Oh Rowan Tree’) he sang during his night on the tiles with the playwright. Unfortunately for the film, some will think, this scene is not allowed to speak for ...”