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“... Cotard sees the news of Harold Pinter’s death in the paper, Asian flu is spreading, the first black graduate of the University of Mississippi has just died. Cotard’s wife is about to leave him, taking their little girl with her. The play he is currently directing is Death of a Salesman, and his gimmick is to have young actors take the roles of older ...”

“... beginning a man scrapes the leaf of an exotic-looking flower and produces a small amount of blue-black dust. This is the sign of the presence in the earth of a certain grub. At the end of the film a leaf of the same plant is scraped and there is no dust. This is the sign that something is over, an adventure, an experiment, a sequence of crimes, all connected ...”

“... The first movie, shot by Woody Bredell, is a noir classic, full of haunting, half-seen frames in black and white, shadows disappearing into shadows; and there is a burial in the rain that looks like a photographic allusion to a famous Courbet painting, except that here the tableau is dominated by a row of umbrellas. When we first meet Ava Gardner (five years ...”

“... hearts or they weren’t watching. Written, directed and photographed by Cuarón, the film is in black and white, and opens with an image of what seems be a tiled wall. Credits are palely projected on it, but it’s hard to pay attention to them because the tiles are so interesting. It isn’t a wall, it turns out, it’s a floor, and the camera is looking ...”

“... limitations, but helpless against them. Even when reduced to the size of a postage stamp, or to black and white, there is no mistaking the pull and the skill and the force of his ...”

“... his side: in this dense quilted blue of his, in his red and his shadowless green and the reddish black of his wine bottles. And the humbleness of all his objects: the apples are cooking apples and the wine bottles belong in the bulging pockets of an old coat.The two volumes of the New Poems are, in my view, among the most beautiful poetic sequences ever ...”

“... Goldcrest has produced All dogs go to heaven (a full-length cartoon) and Mike Hodges’s Black Rainbow, and makes money. The old (real) Goldcrest also made money, in the early days, but mainly it offered what it thought of as quality films, or, as the jargon of the trade would have it, ‘first-class product’. Quality films, but not art films. The ...”

“... all the rest of the features – and performed a ruthless are until it split apart into two coal-black ovals. It was through this dominating organ, that his heavy middle-European accent seemed to issue, and hardly at all from the little mouth, perched below its overhang, that only appeared to serve as a hub, for a cartwheel of wrinkles.’ The librarian ...”

“... the field was a white paradise of loneliness, and a starlit wind made the glass shake like loose, black water and the ice snore on the sill.’ ‘Raindrops, highlighted, were sliding in slant ocelli across the windowpane.’ The ocelli and the alliteration, like the snoring ice and the white paradise, surely belong in some faded poetry book. But even ...”

“... say and “flawlessly proportioned”,’ she wrote to Vita on 5 June 1918: Julian’s hair was black and silky. Eve found herself wondering what it would feel like to stroke, and promptly did so; she was amazed to feel a sensation akin to pain shoot up her fingers and lodge itself definitely in the region of her heart … she was determined to analyse ...”

“... superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ‘torrenting’, ‘blasting’, ‘hot-rocking’ or ‘up-skirting’. People hang out at Porkies (a restaurant), Jester (a club) or Dzoker (a pub). DVDs dubbed into the wrong minority ...”

“... to light on a good read for the plane, his eye is assaulted by a thwacking array of swastikas on black, gold and blood-red fields. Approaching them at random but with a certain circumspection, he finds, for example, Philippe van Rindt’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler, in which it is revealed that Hitler survived his attempts at suicide in the bunker; The Murder ...”

“... are invariably expressions of enthusiasm, celebrating the imaginative freedoms of urban life: for black and Asian writers, London is a place not of exile or alienation, but of ‘self-expansion’. Sandhu’s story gets going in the 18th century. There were blacks in London before then, but he wants to ‘show how they have depicted the city, rather than how ...”

“... of breakdowns and benzedrine. Much as Powell and Pressburger re-created India in Pinewood for Black Narcissus, GWTW represents the triumph of artifice, the South of the 1860s concocted on a Hollywood lot. While the book was an ante-modernist throwback, a 1930s riposte to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the film lovingly embraces the possibilities of technology. It ...”

“... is a singularly fitting profession, requiring cogitation first and foremost. On the other hand, as Michael White and John Gribbin intimate, Hawking seems to have been a listless student and a rather charmless young man before ALS struck, obviously intelligent but lacking any passion to use his intelligence in one direction rather than another. Thus arises the ...”