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“... A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A memorial to Carson’s late brother, Michael, Nox has found as much attention, and as much praise, as any book by any poet in the past couple of years. The praise is disturbing, sometimes wrongheaded, and reflects a category mistake; it also makes a good excuse to look back at the spiky virtues of ...”

“... into a studio of chairs and cameras and wires. And when we see Ann in close-up we realise that her white dress has been marked by long, stylised lines of blood, and that she is dying, as in a vampire movie. She will do the same thing again the following night.There are many repetitions in the film, reminders that this show, like others, is only a show. But ...”

“... She shows it to us, held between her toes. The movie is shot by Bruno Delbonnel in black and white, but its dominant colour is a very pale grey. The witch speaks, as the witches in Macbeth always do, of ‘fog and filthy air’, and we see a filthy screen straight away, with two birds faintly discernible in the fog, hovering as if in an air show. This ...”

“... for example. Or you could just watch the water, and think about movement, about the delicate white spray and the sheer weight of the tide. You could even, if you wanted to bend the allegory another way, think the sea was a pretty poor model for revolution, since it just keeps doing what it does, and doesn’t care about injustice. It might rage, but it ...”

“... and there are many beautiful shots of snowy fields which, along with the constant views of white veils and black habits, give the effect of a film with no other colour, or where the colour flickers in and out as we get glimpses of hands and faces. The cinematographer is Caroline Champetier, and the elegant neutrality of the framing, which must be what ...”

“... for her that there was much talk at the first communion of this event – the little girl all in white with a tiara – being just like a wedding. The problem is not that she can’t marry her father, it’s that she already has, and even death will not effect a divorce. And here a recurring image from the film’s early stages comes to mind. Agustín is ...”

“... hero and his guests, and then throws up on the floor. ‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘The white wine came out with the fish.’ This last scene is meant to be the film’s comic and sentimental finale, but it doesn’t work, and here Oldman doesn’t get beyond a projection of self-pity. It’s sad and sloppy, but in part redeemed by Charles Dance’s ...”

“... also involves Augie, but more centrally. He leaves the Technicolor film set for the black and white backstage of a theatre, and then steps out onto a balcony in a narrow city street: a theatre district somewhere, plenty of neon lights in the background. This is as close as any movie is going to get to a certain kind of realism, presenting a true picture ...”

“... of Christianity has become merely vestigial. The complexities of the situation are endless. Michael Ramsey set out on his journey to this perilous office in 1904, as the son of a Cambridge mathematics don. His mother had been educated at Oxford – early days for such a distinction though those were, for a woman – and was a suffragette and a ...”

“... It’s a good answer, and Ayckbourn no doubt took it kindly and got the point. But it bothers Michael Billington, who can’t tell the story without cleaning it up, indeed turning it into a testimonial. ‘That was not brusqueness or rudeness – Ayckbourn testifies that Pinter was an extremely nice guy – but simply an absolute belief in the self ...”

“... and Bliss, a boy of mysterious parentage raised in the black church, who has fled North, passed as white, and become Adam Sunraider, the racist New England Senator. As Callahan has put it together, the novel begins with the failed effort of Hickman and his flock to warn Sunraider that a young black man is out to assassinate him. Organised as a set of ...”

“... Michael Clune​ first took heroin in July 1997. Afterwards, he lay on the roof of his friend Chip’s New York apartment: A single cloud moved through the blue sky … My eye was a glass box, and inside it there was no time. I kept the cloud inside it. I wish I could show it to you. I never imagined this could happen ...”

“... novels, the last three of which are available in English (from Harvill) as All Souls, A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even better, rhythms of afterthought to carry over into ...”

“... George Stephen-applesauce. There’s a copy prominently displayed in the new books section of the White House library, and 742,000 have been shipped to bookstores to meet the demand. It’s number one on the New York Times bestseller list; North American paperback rights have been sold for $1.5 million, and Mike Nichols has bought the movie rights for another ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”