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“... in Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Though the obvious does occasionally have to be explained. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part II, ‘if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ It’s an accident, of course, that another Corleone is played by Robert De Niro, the first of the ludicrously quarrelling men in Killers of ...”

“... the fore. Canada claims that the passage constitutes Canadian internal waters. In 1986, it drew ‘straight baselines’ around its Arctic islands. Under international law, straight baselines may be used to link the outer headlands of an archipelago or fragmented coastline. Provided the lines are of a reasonable length, the ...”

“... gently playing ‘Ave Maria’. Again, death is only a front, and a discreetly hidden door leads straight into a speakeasy, with dancing girls, ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ rather than Gounod (some like it hot), and various coffees served under the names of various whiskeys. Or rather the reverse: any whiskey you want as long as you call it coffee. The place is ...”

“... practice of his art. Seeing things has a similar geometrical leitmotiv or schema, and that is the straight line, or pattern of straight lines, dazzling as op art, and producing the sensation of depth. The lines are not adduced from such obvious sources as waves, layers of rock or clouds at sunset; they are rooted in ...”

“... this regularly as a matter of narrative efficiency: you cut out the ‘and then and then’ and go straight to the next chosen moment, from the take-off to the landing say, without the details of the long flight. But they don’t always invite you to ponder the missing minutes or years, as Richard Linklater’s films do. There is a brilliant elision of this ...”

“... the pretence that they have psyches and the abandonment of everything except getting their lines straight. An irreverent viewer is going to think of Monty Python every five minutes. And yet. The sheer anguished seriousness of the work, the sense that human beings might well be reduced to the bare essence of their distress, and that a camera could catch them ...”

“... It is written. In a very fine joke on its own status the movie explicitly settles on D, and goes straight into the rousing musical credits. The uncertainty and embarrassment of the film’s direction have to do with the sheer misery it dives into and flies over. In the early sections, everything happens too fast and is too brightly lit: it feels like tourism ...”

“... on his family and no one else, and to permit himself even murder in the name of fidelity and straight dealing. He has inherited a crime empire from his boss and mentor, Bumpy Johnson, who dies at the start of the film. Lucas was his driver, collector and hit man: in a shocking brief pre-credit sequence, still working for Johnson, he soaks a man in petrol ...”

“... female guards captured by the Allies stood in line, middle-aged and grim. Then a younger one spoke straight to camera. She was blonde and dishevelled; she said her name, her age – 24 – and that she had been at Belsen two months. She looked terrified. I felt sorry for her, and shocked that I was. This novel is about someone like her, and examines the ...”

“... In Michael Frayn’s first novel, The Tin Men, there is a character who is supposed to be writing a novel, but mainly concentrates on devising the blurbs and reviews for the as yet unstarted book, as if the work itself was merely the plodding cause of a glittering celebrity effect, and ideally could be dispensed with altogether ...”

“... I read​  The Zone of Interest straight through twice from beginning to end and it feels like I’ve read nothing at all. I could read it again, if I thought it would make any difference. Perhaps in some strange way it’s a compliment to the book – this love story set among Germans in Auschwitz: good idea? waiting world? story whose time has come? yes? – or to its calculation, its finely calibrated scales, that what survives of it is (pace Larkin) nothing ...”

“... back’, but only because there are so many questions we can’t answer by looking straight at them. And Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in a new book called Delete (Princeton, £16.95), thinks what he calls ‘biological forgetting’ (‘built into our human physiology, down through the millennia of human evolution’) is a ‘perfectly ...”

“... idea of embracing chance by calling it destiny. And it’s not just simple, it’s quick and straight, as if common sense ruled a crazy world and it was the plodding policeman who is usually right, rather than the eccentric private eye or rogue cop. What would we do with Dupin or Holmes or Marlowe or Morse if this was the case?Ma is distressed by the ...”

“... For 27 years Michael Wharton has written the ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. He was only 43 when he secured this good, steady job and now he has published an autobiographical account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia ...”

“... case, when I rang my commanding officer to ask for instructions, that admirable man told me to go straight back to bed unless I wanted to start a Third World War. So I did, and, thankfully, a few weeks later left the region for good. If that was what the peace would be like, I reflected, there was more to be said for war than I had previously realised. I was ...”