Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... gym I belong to – became existential torture devices. No more Frasier reruns or baseball: just Peter Jennings and dirty bombs.The boys with tattoos flexed nervously. Even the female-to-male transsexuals looked shaken. (It’s a gay gym.) I went through my own quiet days feeling gusty, shocked and forlorn. Blakey was still in Chicago. One evening I broke ...

The Uninvited

Jeremy Harding: At The Rich Man’s Gate, 3 February 2000

... from Marseille to Oran and come overland in the hope of obtaining a visa to Lisbon. Ugarte (Peter Lorre), a forger and procurer of documents, asks Rick to look after two sets of safe-conduct papers until his clients arrive. ‘You despise me, don’t you?’ he says to Rick. ‘You object to the kind of business I do, huh? But think of all those poor ...

The Laying on of Hands

Alan Bennett, 7 June 2001

... and not be seen and well back on the side aisle he thought he had found it, instead of which the fuller the church became the more he seemed the focus of attention. It was very vexing. In fact no one was looking at Treacher at all, except when they pretended to look at him in order also to take in someone sitting in the row behind. A worldlier man than ...