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“... a source of vision, rather than of funds or themes. Still, it is distressing to see so much energy burn away to waste, and so much money frightened off. The realm of film finance, this weird zone where hard-headed folks put heavy money into fantasy, gets narrower every day, and so our films get narrower too, endless repeats of a handful of recipes. However, we ...”

“... that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.’ The grisly, tasteless, literary gag is perfectly placed. No metaphorical maturity here; tragic dignity turns to ...”

“... oil-producing province, Alberta, recently told Dick Cheney that his province ‘had energy to burn’. The short-term benefits of increased energy exports are considerable, especially when world prices are high, and Canadian politicians are all too well aware of this. Swollen government revenue and job creation in the oil-fields will, they calculate, make ...”

“... At the Grammy awards the other week, an unusual note was struck by Michael Greene, a record industry bigwig. The only real point of interest at most award ceremonies is the frocks (and sometimes, admittedly, the hair), so it was a break with tradition when Greene and his tuxedo launched into the subject of Internet piracy ...”

“... nerves and awareness of an outsider as an insider. Characters with knowledge and sensitivity to burn, people who ordinarily, in fiction, would coin a few bon mots, give the encyclopedias a run for their money, or stare fascinatingly out of the window, are made to be action heroes. It makes the books both harder and softer than you think they will be, or ...”

“... once seen a blaze incinerate a nearby villa, so I knew how quickly these old wooden houses could burn. In our case, the situation was exacerbated by the polyurethane foam cushions on the window-seat where the Molotov cocktail had landed. Polyurethane superheats when ignited, forming a column of flame and emitting a cloud of toxic gas: as a result it was ...”

“... shine, and he doesn’t have foibles. His life is dim and deeply fortunate. He has money to burn and devoted people to look after and love him. His soul is stagnant; and if clinical depression is compatible with living like a gourmet prince, he is depressed. This is where we need to remember, though, that he is not exactly a person. There is a clue ...”

“... the handOf yonder knight?Servingman: I know not, sir.Romeo: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!It seems she hangs upon the cheek of nightLike a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear –Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.Romeo and Juliet, I.v.How should​ present-day readers and theatre-goers respond when Romeo, enjoying his first ...”

“... visit to the clinic. The rest of the novel consists of dialogue between Alicia and her doctor, Michael Cohen, taking place over several sessions in the weeks leading up to her suicide. By comparison with The Passenger, with its cryptic lapses into memory, dream and flashback and all its dangling plot threads, Stella Maris is alarmingly ...”

“... the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), as told by Michael Scharf, a one-time US appointee at the UN and a Tribunal insider, is full of unexpected and telling ironies. Not the least of these concerns the involvement of the US Administration, which had previously been so worried about the possibility of having to ...”

“... would be left for a few days until the bushes and scrub, which were mostly green, dried enough to burn. Then we would come back and set it alight. The heat from the fire would melt the solder that was in the tins, and it would fall down into the ashes and onto the ground. Then, when the fire finished burning and cooled off we used to sieve the ashes and the ...”

“... sausages and sauerkraut’ on his desk. Blown away is an endlessly quotable dip-read. The burn-out and breakdown that the Stones took six years to reach, if we go along with Wyman and Hotchner in seeing the death of Brian Jones as the point when something ended for good, the Jimi Hendrix Experience managed in three. Noel Redding’s terrific ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”

“... than their unseeded quarter-final opponents, they were terrible. Henman called his match against Michael Stich ‘my worst experience on a tennis court’. He couldn’t get a first serve in. He stayed back on the second serve and couldn’t get that in either. He couldn’t return. He missed volleys (against Krajicek he volleyed like Edberg). Even his famed ...”

“... for Mr Laurence’s magnum opus. Shaw’s dislike of bibliolatry (vented in Caesar’s ‘Let it burn’ on hearing that the library of Alexandria was in flames) thwarted several potential bibliographers during his life, and their labours (which Mr Laurence describes as ‘unintentionally amusing’ and ‘eccentrically devised’) did not amount to very ...”