Search Results

“... A couple of years ago there was one of those Barry Humphries TV specials in which the Australian entertainer teases an audience of notables to the edge of humiliation. The guests attend to the act warily, poised between the pleasure of being official celebrities and the fear of being publicly ridiculed. After tormenting various patsies in a way that must have made them wish there was an RSPCA for humans, Dame Edna (for it was she) suddenly spotted Melvyn Bragg ...”

“... rubber, half-inch screws or military takeovers. Sometimes, he took three hundred telephone calls a day. There was a time in Hollywood when Ovitz was perceived as the awesome future already arrived: the incarnation of long-held fears concerning what talent agents might become. But it’s clear now that he was also the last of a dying breed (so many American ...”

“... on your ex-wife, your sullen children, your forgetful old father, poor exam results, a bad hair day or a piss-poor speech by the pope. Depressing real-life events come and go, but your general capacity to feel gladness is fixed. This is good news for the pharmaceutical industry, but it won’t do much for publishers, who continue to believe that feelings of ...”

“... than I am now to the essentially crackpot activity of sitting down alone several hours a day with an assortment of ghosts. I envied people who, even while they often complained about each other, collaborated, sped in taxis to urgent conferences; they appeared (I begin to doubt this now) saner and happier for having to do with each other. I thought of ...”

“... the Third Reich censors removed Ophuls’s name from the credits and he left Germany on the day after the Reichstag fire, it was banned by the Allied Commission when the war was over because its success had happened to coincide with the Nazi regime. It begins behind the scenes at the Vienna Opera House. The first act of The Abduction from the Seraglio ...”

“... from Illinois and presidential candidate, passed through San Francisco last month during a three-day visit to California, the climax of which was an ‘exclusive’ fund-raiser at Oprah Winfrey’s estate in Santa Barbara County, expected to raise around $3.5 million. Winfrey is a good friend to have, whether you’re moving depilatories, novels or ...”

“... monumental celebration, on a grand scale, of a scruffy little rag whose production values, to this day, owe much to its memorable antecedent, the British Railways lavatory roll. It’s a good thing that only one of them has lived to tell the tale. And a pleasure to see the Eye crowing over its longevity and many narrow escapes – several fools and villains ...”

“... on the spot for a nimble piece of mental arithmetic. Likewise, if you want to know the time, the day is long gone when you could ask a policeman. We have now reached the stage when it is impossible to get a straight answer out of so humble a practitioner as a historian. ‘Not my period’ has become proverbial as an attempt to pass off ignorance as ...”

“... proved the falsest Rogue, and she the most profligate whore in either Kingdom.’ Iris Barry, in the introduction to her 1928 edition of the Memoirs, marks our heroine’s abrupt transformation in that fateful year of 1737: ‘The nice, pretty, poetical Mrs Pilkington disappears at this date: the celebrated Mrs Pilkington appears in her ...”

“... at the events of 9/11, implying that it had shown great leadership in finding what happened that day very bad. George W. Bush has boiled doublethink down to a sticky residue: ‘you’re either for us or you’re for the terrorists’ is its central flavour. But choosing New York for the convention was overweening even by Republican standards: like Woody ...”

“... Alan Black, survived despite having being shot 18 times. The Kingsmill massacre took place the day after five Catholic men were shot dead by a loyalist gang that included at least one RUC officer. At about 6 p.m. three masked men went into a house in Whitecross (near where the bus would be stopped the next day) and shot ...”

“... atmosphere of overheated desperation so well, or so affectionately, as François Truffaut’s Day for Night. As a double-edged reminder that it is on the director’s broad shoulders that the success of the enterprise ultimately rests, and that it is only in his head that the complete formula is held, Truffaut cast himself as the abstracted but notably ...”

“... blur: I have no words. Grief is an orchestra. He has no hope. All lovelessness is bitter. A day will come. I do admire your purpose. When I am killed, you may not fail to want me.However desperate the longing, these full-stopped lines have the numb feeling of words no sooner said than repeated ad nauseam, like passionate love songs heard echoing from a ...”

“... in Hertfordshire, ‘perhaps the single most successful industry that continues to the present day is that of film-making.’ Elstree Studios in Borehamwood were founded in 1914, and eighty years later Warner Brothers opened studios on the site of the former Leavesden aerodrome at Abbots Langley – they’re now home to Harry Potter World. How can knobbly ...”

“... mourners gather: from brave wife to Neanderthal uncle-in-law, from plain-speaking Cousin Essie to Barry Shuskin the cryonics bore. Cryonics: that is the tip-off. In one view of the world, Henry might die and go to heaven. In Barry Shuskin’s view of the world, Henry might ‘die’, spend a purgatorial period in an ...”