If you've watched the movie Before Sunrise, you know that Vienna is as much of a character in this romance as the two young lovers.
In a world that has lost much of its romance, she spends her time saying things like "Hello, big boy" to anyone who'll pay her for phone sex.
The affair became public anyway, when The Detroit Free Press published steamy text messages earlier this year from a city-owned pager that detailed much of the romance between Mr. Kilpatrick and his chief of staff, Christine Beatty.
Thus, J. Edgar was as much a romance as an account of a power-hungry bureaucrat who became one of the most feared and loathed figures in American life.
Elizabeth and Tom, the passionate, pugnacious lovers of Gary Henderson's "Skin Tight" at 59E59 Theaters, spend much of their romance slapping, punching, slamming and even stabbing each other.
McDonagh, like Frank McCourt, has done his part in stripping away much of the romance that continues to cling to Ireland, especially rural Ireland; the world he shows us is one of brutality, alcohol, and poverty.
In it, Mr. Schultz bemoaned the "watering down" of the Starbucks experience, blaming the expediencies of rapid growth for removing "much of the romance and theater" from the ubiquitous stores.
He emails: "The FA Cup may have lost much of its romance, but it still has considerably more of it than IKEA Croydon where I am drinking keenly priced, if hideous, coffee and catching the free Wifi.
For many of the 12 million visitors to Paris every year, much of the romance comes from retracing old steps - and this time that meant ambling through the Passages, the eighteenth-century glass-roofed streets which are the precursors of the modern shopping mall.
