Bean and his director, Nicholas Hytner, have managed to make the dinner scene funnier than ever by adding a character: an octogenarian waiter, magnificently played by Tom Edden, whose hand alarmingly quivers as he serves a tureen of soup and who has an amazing capacity to fall backwards down stairs and return like a rubber ball.
The manuscript was copied by a scribe whose hand is also seen in several other vernacular manuscripts: Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 207 (John Gower, Confessio amantis), London, British Library, MS Arundel 119 (Lydgate, Siege of Thebes), and Tokyo, Private Collection, MS 54 (South English Legendary, second hand).
Only psycho-analysis and ethnography seem capable of explaining a phenomenon like the modern literary festival, behind which there seems to lie an archaic suspicion of printing and a desire to see that the words on the page were truly put there by a human, whose hand one wants to physically witness moving across paper.
Not very savvy advance work from the Perry campaign: Perry "walk[ed] by a mannequin … whose hand was raised above her head – a hand Perry tried to call on during a question-and-answer period".
Aiden's total betrayal by his pal Bruce, whose hand Aiden held when Bruce's wife left him and when he had a health scare, now stabbing him in the back and kicking him in the balls, when he's down.
One of the ape's hands is chained by "mother" nature (the woman) whose hand in turn is chained by God (left, bottom).
Guernica Magazine, meanwhile, published an excellent and haunting little profile by Felicity Thompson of a man whose hand was chopped off during civil war in Sierra Leone.
