At that incendiary moment in 1944 when she made her screen debut in To Have and Have Not, Lauren Bacall, who has died aged 89, was still Betty Bacall, and had been recently Betty Perske, a stagestruck teenager whose poor family finances bought her a bare year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (fellow pupil and first crush, Kirk Douglas), and whose fought-for early parts were in flops.
A BARE two years before the ceremonial opening of St Peter's Holy Door hails the new millennium, Romans are scratching their heads.
Then, for (sadly) comic relief, we have Katy and Preston, who, married a bare two years and ardently of the purist party, are mainly involved in strategizing their marital misery.
A bare five years after he engineered the big price hike, he gathered a handful of soil, left his country, and started roaming the world in search of a place of exile.
Tonight's campaign-launching speech was a crucial moment for Mr. Bush, the speech of a lifetime for a politician whose time in elective office has been confined to a bare six years as governor of Texas.
Then it was the first president Bush up against Bill Clinton; now it's Bill's wife, Hillary, who could face Bush senior's youngest boy, Jeb, in the presidential election next year – a bare eight years after his oldest son, George W, left the White House.
In August 1948, after a bare two years of planning, scrimping, begging, borrowing and recycling to cope with the appalling honour of hosting the 1948 Olympic Games in the rationed, battered, bomb crater pockmarked capital of postwar Britain – all of which can be tracked through the archives of the Guardian – there was finally something else to worry about.
But when someone slipped me John Gilmore's Laid Bare some years back, curiosity trumped annoyance.
How about it's been a bare eighteen years since The Silence of the Lambs swept Best Picture, Actor, Actress, and Director?
