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“... developments that sprang up in Kingston in the 1960s and 1970s.) The killings in the title of Marlon James’s novel – a novel that’s built around the attempt on Marley’s life much as Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) are built around the Kennedy assassination – turn ...”

“... rootlessness. Cinema as a medium urges us to view ourselves as actors presenting ourselves. So Marlon Brando could be a paraplegic after the war, he could be Zapata, Napoleon, a mafia don, or Lee Clayton, swanning around the Missouri Breaks country in a dress, a bonnet and an italic Irish accent. He might be a used-up ex-boxer on the Jersey docks. Or an ...”

“... whiner.’ In fact, Mr Richards doesn’t write at all. The author produced the book ‘with James Fox’, a journalist and friend of Richards’s, but we aren’t told how the collaboration worked. I’d guess that Keith talked into a recorder over a long period of time, prompted and unprompted by his ghost-writer, and then Fox took the recordings and ...”

“... he means those over forty – ‘make the best subjects,’ which would explain the contents (James Hewitt to Henry Kissinger by way of Geoffrey Boycott, Charlton Heston, Dave Lee Travis and Norman Tebbit), but you have to wonder how much of a coincidence it is that men over forty not only ‘make the best subjects’ but also make the best Telegraph ...”

“... fallen idols of American popular culture, challenging listeners to ‘name the last good film that Marlon Brando made/While trying to keep his kid from going to jail.’ ‘Too late to crash, too late to burn, too late to die young,’ goes the chorus. The song is softened somewhat by the singer’s sense of his own life lacking much direction or purpose; and ...”

“... as a bonus, a small gasp of astonishment. But once you start to think of them as Greta and Marlon you’re back with a bump to the absurdity of real life. There’s nothing more certain to wreck a lazy daydream of being taken roughly into the arms of your chosen idol than the moment when you have to imagine yourself whispering, ‘Oh, Clint ...”

“... murmurs: ‘I don’t see any method at all, sir.’ It’s true that between them Coppola and Marlon Brando, playing Kurtz, had by now thoroughly overdosed on the various brooding mysteries Conrad so helpfully provides, losing whatever storyline they had to sheer, contentless atmosphere. But the methods of Kurtz, as they have been evoked for us in the ...”

“... of Gore Vidal. Kaplan, a professor of English in New York whose taxidermies include Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle (they hardly get deader than Carlyle), understands that it’s much easier to get the paperwork done if you don’t have the living-breathing item second-guessing you at every turn or trying to use you as a ventriloquist’s ...”

“... for invasion and insurrection than those surprised Americans at Pearl Harbor. The movie (and James Jones’s novel, on which it was based) presented that peace-time army as a community wherein a vicious and slothful officer might neglect his duties, turning over his responsibilities to the Top Sergeant, while the Other Ranks (or the Enlisted Men, as the ...”

“... a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured. It’s not only, Thomson says, that Ledger wasn’t the actor Dean was. It’s that movies, and their ...”

“... Get engaged. Probably work in Safeways worst luck. I haven’t lost it yet because I want respect. Marlon Frederic’s nice but he’s a bit dark. I like Madness. The lead singer’s dead good. My mum is bad with her nerves. She won’t let me do nothing. Michelle. It’s just boring. This may be convincing as a transcript of a classroom discussion, but as a ...”

“... professor and Unitarian minister, his mother came from a distinguished Boston family. William James introduced the pair and became one of Edward Estlin’s godfathers. As well as the grand house at 104 Irving Street where he was born, Cummings’s family had a summer house in New Hampshire, which he would enjoy until the end of life. He died there in 1962 ...”

“... Midwich Cuckoos adaptation Village of the Damned; the BBC’s Dead of Night series and its M.R. James Christmas ghost stories; Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital. In a way, Young is writing a new history of British film and television, an alternative to the more respectable version that has tended to focus on Loach and Leigh, Powell ...”

“... spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American crash: the James Dean, Eddie Cochran legend-sealer; the Bob Dylan at Woodstock disaster turned into an opportunity for reinvention; and the sweet Gene Vincent long martyrdom. Clift could have been another James Dean. Instead he was ...”

“... Sartre. François Mauriac, three years away from his Nobel Prize, was in the audience. So was Marlon Brando. After the concert he gave Gréco a ride home on his motorbike. ‘Si tu t’imagines,’ indeed.But the song isn’t a wish-upon-a-star fantasy. ‘Imagine’, here, is used in its finger-wagging, admonitory sense: you’ve got another think coming ...”