“... Lucien – his real surname is Chardon, but he soon puffs himself up into de Rubempré – is a young poet who has caught the eye of Mme de Bargeton (Cécile de France), a local aristocrat bored with her ancient, indifferent husband. After a scene or two showing Lucien lying in a field and writing a bit, then at work in a printer’s shop, he takes off for ...”

“... up until later. Eventually, the cryptic priest decides to tell the boy what he wants to know. Two young lovers wanted to marry, but the girl’s father, the marquis, explained to the suitor why this wouldn’t work. He could marry his daughter only to someone as well-born as she and immensely rich. The suitor met the first criterion, but failed the ...”

“... Paris cinema, taking down the letters describing last week’s films from the marquee. An amiable young German soldier shows up, who turns out to be a war hero – he killed 350 Americans single-handedly – and the star of a movie about his exploits. Here the plot distinctly thickens. Goebbels is in town for the movie’s premiere, and so, we learn, will be ...”

“... he takes to lunch after bumping into her in the street. For him, she is not only an attractive young woman but an unintelligible instance of life itself, lived as if all you have to do is live it. He wishes he could ‘be alive like that for only one day’. He can’t, but it does him good to be near the phenomenon. His own description of what has ...”

“... an architect of considerable reputation. This is where chance plays its first major game.A rich young man (Joe Alwyn) wants the Hungarians to convert a room in his family’s palatial house into a grandiose library. The conversion is to be a gift to the boy’s father, who currently knows nothing of this. Tóth and a bunch of workers produce a Bauhaus ...”

“... smart, active and gentlemanly-looking; his age is about 30 years.’ Such was the picture of the young Michael Davitt, Fenian suspect, produced by the police detective who was watching him in 1869. (In fact, he was working-class, and 24 years old.) Somewhat later, after seven years’ penal servitude, he was seen by the Irish Parliamentarian ...”

“... this time our life was hanging by a thread’; ‘I felt drawn as if by a magnet to the young lady at my side.’ But the narrative is pretty continuously absorbing for what it tells us about everyday life in Hitler’s Germany and, in particular, about the predicament, the reactions and the motivation of the doomed Jewish community. The value of ...”

“... does get brittler and bonier, the dry voice gets dryer. But there was always an older lady in the young woman, and there is a skittish young woman in the old lady. She wasn’t wiser than her years, but she was smarter and snappier than her years were supposed to be, whatever the years were. In Adam’s Rib (1949), for ...”

“... in the film moves on from one partner to another, prostitute to soldier to servant to rich young man to erring wife to worldly husband to midinette to writer to actress to foppish aristocrat and back to the prostitute, and the narrative seems full of wisdom about the shallows of the human heart. I’ve always found the film entertaining, but have never ...”

“... cold of that horrible winter, the economists faced a prospect that belied the assumptions of the young Hennessys, that there was nowhere to go but up. If American support really came to an end, there would be no alternative but the virtual abandonment of all overseas expenditure, and austerity on a scale far worse than that of the war. When it came to the ...”

“... hasn’t got is a plot or a point, so it feels like three hours of exposition. Casino shares with Michael Mann’s Heat the curious contemporary sense that your really classy crime movie doesn’t have to worry about suspense or story. It’s as if The Godfather, or rather its retrospective status, had made the genre so respectable that we need to be a little ...”

“... Atlantis of the European mind, as vivid beneath the waves as it was above them. Norman Stone and Michael Glenny’s book is a scrapbook of Atlantis, an oral history of survivors from the sinking. Many of them were in their eighties when Glenny’s tape-recorder finally reached them in their close, cluttered rooms and for this alone – preserving these ...”

“... eyes widened. Then he rose to his feet, and finally he exploded. ‘If this article is published, young man I shall sue your newspaper for one hundred thousand pounds.’ A hundred thousand pounds seemed a lot of money in those days. Controlling my instinct to bolt, I must have stammered out some question about the nature of the libel he was sure we had ...”

“... found themselves living alongside emaciated hymn-singing Poles released from Stalin’s camps. The young Czerniawski learned Hebrew and Arabic, and had to mind his p’s and q’s in both. Historical and racial strife were filtered down to the boy in striking linguistic and cultural brushes: ‘I now have a long trek to the Polish school in Montefiore ...”

“... about Reform in the 1790s turned out well in the long run. The same may be true of the 1980s. The young aspirants who have pinned their hopes to the SLD and electoral reform may include the Charles Grey of a great enactment in 2032. According to the polls, nearly half of Britain’s electors think the electoral system ‘unfair’. That was roughly how things ...”