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“... style is a permanent challenge to anyone who has the courage to translate Céline. With Normance, Marlon Jones has done as good a job as anyone could hope to do, even while taking note, in his introduction, of Céline’s contempt for translators. Céline called them ‘trouducteurs’, a neologism merging the words for translator and anus. It is a ...”

“... makes up for (nearly) everything, however, with a terrific anecdote about Truman Capote and Marlon Brando. CAPOTE: You tell him about yourself, and slowly spin your web so that he tells you everything. That’s how I trapped Marlon. BRANDO: The little bastard spent half the night telling me his problems. I figured ...”

“... 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.’ ‘Too late to crash, too late to burn, too late to die young,’ goes the chorus. The song is softened somewhat by the singer’s sense of his own life lacking much direction or purpose; and ...”

“... for invasion and insurrection than those surprised Americans at Pearl Harbor. The movie (and James Jones’s novel, on which it was based) presented that peace-time army as a community wherein a vicious and slothful officer might neglect his duties, turning over his responsibilities to the Top Sergeant, while the Other Ranks (or the Enlisted Men, as the ...”

“... I was interviewed by a Swiss television team: ‘Don’t you think England might go Fascist, Mr Jones? A quiet English sort of Fascism?’ ‘Abs’lument pas!’ I snapped (quoting from a favourite French film), ‘Abs’lument pas!’ – with a confidence I could not muster today. Then, a contemporary at a college reunion (a conservative chap, working ...”

“... Robert Redford. He should have taken lessons in the British accent from the hard-working Marlon Brando. Firmly hooked to the movie, this elaborate Century edition of Out of Africa is packed with illustrations which will appeal to nostalgic movie-weepers but have nothing to do with the text. We are reading about an interesting Kikuyu called ...”

“... the greatest risks. Here he plays an American-Italian trying to continue his romance with Jennifer Jones, an American wife and mother, while she tries to end it by catching a train out of Rome. For all his beauty, Clift comes across as spoilt and unappealing, sabotaging our compassion. It’s a charmingly decentred film, the camera drifting towards other ...”

“... that not to meet the Snowdons was ‘like being in the Garden of Eden without seeing God’. Marlon Brando persuaded Kenneth Tynan to ask her to dinner à trois and then was so tongue-tied that he couldn’t address a word to her except through Tynan: ‘Would you ask the princess what she thinks of …’ Tynan himself wanted to postpone his ...”

“... Loach and Leigh, Powell and Pressburger, Lean and Reed, the Boultings and Woodfall (although Tom Jones does get a long and interesting discussion here). Or at least, that’s the way this book might have been seen fifteen years ago. Now, in fact, many of the works he writes about have been canonised, none more so than the ‘unholy trinity’ of folk horror ...”

“... failed. He ‘discovered’ the 21-year-old Phyllis Walker, née Isley, renamed her ‘Jennifer Jones’, and suggested her as the saintly heroine of The Song of Bernadette. Later, he recast her – as the sultry Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun, otherwise ‘Lust in the Dust’. Finally, he married her. Perhaps, behind all the business acumen and concern ...”

“... Boyer, we were not called on to stand up against the Nazi oppressor or battle like Jennifer Jones against the small-mindedness of nuns or like Cornel Wilde cough blood over the piano keys in order to liberate our country from the foreign yoke. Films taught you to be happy that you were ordinary.Ordinary but not respectable, because in films respectable ...”