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“... declared “What have you against Rabbi Eliezer, for his teaching is correct?” ’ This is sheer Woody Allen: the McLuhan scene in Annie Hall. But Vermes goes on to explain ‘that this intervention was ruled out of order because in the Bible it is written that decisions are to be reached by majority vote.’ In the context of the present debate I ...”

“... you may, Earl, honey. I am Lady Darlene.’ There are even touches of Gracie (or is it Woody?) Allen:   ‘Was your father weak, passive, absent from home a lot?’   ‘You mean before he died?’ There is also a glum, constant sense of history being erased by show business, or just business. Chloris ...”

“... dying of radiation sickness along with everybody else.’ On a first reading, the story is a Woody Allen sketch (‘If I thought the Permian age was the pits it was only because I hadn’t yet lived through the Triassic’) with a darker-than-usual ending. With further readings, however, the story takes on a more sustainedly compassionate timbre and ...”

“... giving things a name.’ Antonioni is admired for his ‘establishment of distance’ and Woody Allen for the ‘rarefaction of images and particularly of angles … theorised in Annie Hall’. What Charlie Chaplin’s little barber is saying in The Great Dictator comes from somewhere that might be nowhere. Daney’s summary of the speech ...”

“... of European Jews in flight from the Holocaust. It is the closely bonded immigrant milieu that Woody Allen affectionately revisited in Radio Days; Bernard Malamud set a number of early stories there. Audrey is also leaving behind a six-year-old’s memories of war: the departure of sweetheart Bobby, rationing, the wire on the milk bottles which her ...”

“... as Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs – who claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in his. Woody Allen parodied it as the ‘Orgasmatron’ in Sleeper. I wondered what place such a machine would have in a school. What was it that united Neill and Reich, whose close friendship is recorded in their extensive correspondence? And why would such ...”

“... But choosing New York for the convention was overweening even by Republican standards: like Woody Allen, only less humorously, they wanted the sweep of Manhattan to enlarge a panoply of private concerns, and blinded with tears and outrage, they wanted to forge a kind of unity in commemoration of the disaster. Cynicism is not news in politics: the ...”

“... discovered in long forgotten archives, moved sections from one book-in-progress to another. Allen Ginsberg selected the correspondence that became The Yage Letters. Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac put Naked Lunch together from drastic-looking clumps of torn, coffee-stained fragments; the book’s final sequence was determined by the order in which proof pages ...”

“... matter without being morbid. She is seriously funny. She uses the self-puncturing, depressive, Woody-Allen-like voice with immense skill to examine two sexual subcultures that are (or so it would seem) polar opposites – the desolate world of the sexually abused and the intricate obsolescence of the celibate Catholic ...”

“... so completely to the Romantic depths of Runge and others. When he began, there was a touch of Woody Allen-like wit about him (they share a similar background) but this has withered. Sendak has become a kind of Philip Roth for children. Though there was never anything conciliating about the Sendak vision, he usually resolved his tales with tenderness ...”

“... despite the best efforts of certain philosophers to persuade them otherwise. As Descartes (or Woody Allen) might have said, ‘I know that I think, therefore I am an intentional system.’ This capacity for self-awareness distinguishes us qualitatively, I am happy to say, from thermostats. It depends on consciousness – Dennett’s other main ...”

“... Time is the hard thing to get people to part with, and buying what you do not read can be painful. Woody Allen has a funny piece about the guilt which grows to keep pace with a mounting pile of unread copies of the New York Review of Books. Brody’s attempt to make New Socialist palatable to the young, and the authoritative reassurance and ‘good easy ...”

“... They make good characters themselves: Kahneman – self-effacing, insecure and moody (‘like Woody Allen,’ as one colleague put it, ‘without the humour’) – grew up in Vichy France, in hiding. His father, a chemist, had been saved from deportation to a concentration camp by the intervention of his boss, the founder of L’Oréal ...”

“... the personals column of the New York Review of Books, placed by a young couple straight out of a Woody Allen movie, who want to swap their house and flee post-9/11 New York for the comparative safety of the countryside; on impulse, Zuckerman offers them his house, on condition that they move out straight away. And finally, after re-establishing contact ...”

“... the Holocaust, from a TV play by Jack Rosenthal set in London called Bar Mitzvah Boy, and from Woody Allen films. I’m not sure I was even conscious in the 1970s that Woody Allen was Jewish. He was a funny American comedian who looked a bit like me. I had no Jewish experience. And then came Granny’s ...”