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“... Catching news about the Michael Jackson trial, I can’t help being reminded of a caustic song by Dan Bern, a singer less famous than Jackson by several orders of magnitude, called ‘Too Late to Die Young’. ‘The day that Elvis died was like a mercy killing,’ it begins, before turning its attention to the inglorious late careers of other 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 ...”

“... man in a position made impossible by historical developments, one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what ...”

“... split. You could see the blocks of council flats – many of which have housed the families of young dockworkers quite happily – boarded up, scorned and despised: for the young men and women have moved away. You could see older small houses, once workmen’s cottages, now extremely desirable for ...”

“... a celebrated assassin, started his career as an amateur, killing his father’s murderer. He was young at the time, and knew that his father, a church pastor, would have reminded him that vengeance was best left to the Lord. He also knew that, as he says, he didn’t want to wait that long. In the film he seems more a curser than a killer. Reynolds, as ...”

“... by Jack Thorne from a novel by Nancy Springer. Springer has written more than fifty books for young adults, going some way towards confirming that this category often has nothing to do with the age of the reader, and means only that the writing is better than a lot of what is apparently suited to older adults. Six of Springer’s books are about Enola ...”

“... by inviting us to visit a series of Paris apartments. No dialogue for quite a while, just a young woman arriving and leaving. She is carrying a satchel, seeming to have come home from work. But ‘home’ is already inhabited by a man’s clothes lying all over the place, by piles of books and folders. The woman starts to tidy up, then changes her ...”

“... Urban planning utopias have never been popular except with political elites. Peter Willmott and Michael Young, in Family and Kinship in East London (1957), painted a dire picture of community warmth in the old East End giving way to anomie and alienation in the new towns to which bombed-out families were forced to move. In the end, the destruction of ...”

“... the cosmic. It seems that Mr Levin’s life was changed by discovering Moby Dick. Mr Johnson, as a young man, found it ‘unintelligible’. Now of course Mr Johnson in some sense took over from Mr Levin at what one is tempted to call the late London Times. He was a little worried, following on in this line: ‘Politics was my trade, not the universe.’ No ...”

“... or C.S. Lewis with Boxen, Williams invented an imaginary country; his was called Silvania. As a young man he was bookish and churchy, cursed by an aptitude for writing average verse. Lack of cash led to his leaving University College London, but he soon found a berth in the OUP offices at Amen Corner near St Paul’s. He worked there for the rest of his ...”

“... Phase I live in Berkeleyan hostility With my parents. The fridge bellows Like a young tractor. Very soon I shall Run away and join the Vatican Guard. Back Numbers Carelessly we tore our love Like soft newspapers with feet. Then stooping down, we read With interest some vintage items. Carnal Poem Birds came and pecked at a group of yellow bread crusts scattered on a low roof ...”

“... earlier’. Twenty-four years earlier – that is, about two seconds later – two children, Na Young and Hae Sung, climb a hill on the outskirts of Seoul. They have just left school and Na Young is crying because Hae Sung has, for once, got better marks than she did. He says she’s a psycho, which is apparently meant as ...”

“... therefore became, so to speak, theatrical squared. Their situation also made them competitive. As Michael Young was to point out in The Rise of the Meritocracy, élites based on education lack the security of the old aristocracies of land and money. To live by one’s wits is a nervous business: every younger brain, each new foot on the educational ...”

“... The heart of Young Soul Rebels, visually and dramatically, is a scene in an East London club, noisy, cheerful, full of glitter and bounce. Punk and soul music alternate on the disco deck; punk and soul styles are jumbled on the dance floor. Men and women, black and white, gays and straights, mix easily if loudly, having a good time ...”

“... actors in Le Diable, probablement are taken from a repertoire of cliché. A cluster of disaffected young people from the 1970s act like someone’s notion of disaffected young people from the 1970s: that is, they are schematically apathetic and on their way to being hopelessly dated well before the decade is out. What ought ...”

“... the go-karts was the British driver Terry Fullerton. No mention of Nigel Mansell or Niki Lauda or Michael Schumacher. Still less of Alain Prost. All Senna ever wanted, in this perspective, was to drive cars fast. Politics and fame were for other people; or perhaps just a cross he had to bear. He was fond of calling on God to help him, and of thanking God for ...”