“... popularity and American happiness rose together – ‘the man is our whole nation,’ one young man tells Terkel – because the former actor’s success in surmounting the reality principle, in the television series centred on the White House, provided a model for popular imitation. The great divide also points, as in Vice-President Dan Quayle’s ...”

“... Rogers regretted having missed Leon Trotsky, ‘for I never met a man I didn’t like.’ The young Dwight MacDonald, on the path that would take him from American Trotskyist to mass culture critic, didn’t like Rogers. MacDonald raged at the ‘cheerfully trivial tone’ of his Depression-era movie State Fair, when ‘the American farmer is faced with ...”

“... an attractive woman in her mid-thirties, married to a bisexual art critic named Bernard, and a young man named Simon, who makes a frugal living by occasionally selling some drugs. The author can write well, in a laconic, deliberately flat mode, and Stella’s growing obsession with her hopeless relationship is convincingly charted. But this is one of those ...”

“... about the gap it leaps over. Patricia Arquette, as the affectionate hard-up single mother of two young children, has decided to go to college and improve her job prospects. ‘Life is expensive,’ she tells the children. One day she takes her son Mason with her to class and introduces him to her professor (Marco Perella), an obnoxious fellow in love with ...”

“... 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 people – because they will, if they don’t die first, become older people, and the audience is to feel this in the performance. Nice idea, but Cotard has become a little obsessive about it. Before his wife (Catherine ...”

“... of the bad guys. These doings start with a man placing the grub in a capsule and feeding it to a young woman whose name we later learn is Kris, wonderfully played by Amy Seimetz. Seimetz has the ability (aided by Carruth’s camera no doubt) to look different in almost every scene while remaining manifestly the same person: a sort of visual portrait of what ...”

“... A good thing too, we might think, but this is not the right reaction. The implication is that the young men and women of Belfast have strayed from the church’s wisdom, and this reading is confirmed by an extraordinary, brightly lit shot of Johnny suddenly remembering the famous passage from 1 Corinthians – ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of ...”

“... and could even be got to do a little work. At a wake in Volver a crowd of women hover round a young woman, who is disturbed by the sheer clustering energy of this traditional presence. A high-angle shot makes them look like a tight geometrical pattern, or a wheel, society as a repetitive machine. For a moment what flickers here is the shade not of Buñuel ...”

“... Haiti. The women get less and less casual about their casual affairs, and one of their young men is killed for a reason that has nothing to do with them, and everything to do with abuses of power by the government and its friends. The women don’t know the reason, and therefore don’t know it is unrelated to them; and we are invited to make all ...”

“... killings, already the subject of several books, including one by John Hersey published in 1968. A young cop fires at a looter, and defends himself not on the grounds that the victim was armed or even that he could have been, but that he might have done something else unlawful during the rioting. The victim later dies, and we think this may be an important ...”

“... that Senator Edward Kennedy was again thinking of running for the Democratic nomination. A young reporter had the idea of asking ex-President Nixon for his views on this development. ‘If Teddy Kennedy is serious,’ Nixon is alleged to have replied, ‘then the first thing he should do is lose thirty pounds.’ In a country where Presidential ...”

“... the writers we read, we do not believe such things about relative strangers – that beautiful young man at the gym, that horrible troll there – and neither, as a rule, do we believe them about celebrities. We believe from reading him that Oscar Wilde – in person – was both superficial and profound. Or we believe that Roland Barthes in person ...”

“... aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination. Michael Collie, the more severe of Borrow’s new biographers, notes the instructions Borrow’s publisher gave him when he was writing The Bible in Spain: he was told to report his remarkable achievements, experiences and skills ‘in a natural manner, as if ...”

“... This German novel has waited nearly forty years for its English translator. Michael Hofmann fell in love the moment the Good Fairy told him about it, and set out to liberate it from the thorn hedge of neglect. The Good Fairy, in this case, was a Berlin bookseller ‘who First recommended Koeppen’. Wolfgang Koeppen is 86 ...”

“... moment, represents the voice of ‘youth’ is peculiar enough. REM’s lead singer and lyricist, Michael Stipe, is knocking on 40; other members of the group are older (one, the percussionist Bill Berry, has taken early retirement, on grounds of advanced age and poor health). Stipe is as close in age to Roger Scruton as to Liam Gallagher and, on photographic ...”