The video artist Kogonada's first feature, "Columbus," from 2017, is an extraordinarily well observed, written, and performed movie about artistic passion and the burdens of family life — of grown children's relationships with their parents.
"It's a wordless custom, from what I've observed," wrote Beth J. Harpaz, the mother of two boys, 11 and 16, and a parenting columnist for The Associated Press, in a new book, "13 Is the New 18".
"A Hypochondriack fancies himself at different times suffering death in all the various ways in which it has been observed," wrote James Boswell, "and thus he dies many times before his death".
When it comes to handling the English language, we are all fumblers — with the possible exception of Waugh himself, who, as Gore Vidal once observed, wrote "prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American".
In a 2004 essay in the magazine, Peter Schjeldahl observed: Written with lambent wit, in cascades of sparkling anecdote, Behrman's book remains the most enjoyable literary treatment of the art world since the Goncourt brothers' regular patrols of the Parisian scene.
"There's something really wrong about being worldly," he observes, writing with the stilted virginal earnestness of a Miss America contestant.
"The inherently medical nature of this judgment is not obviated by attempting to qualify it in terms of what a layperson might plainly observe," wrote Justice Albert M. Rosenblatt, in an opinion joined by the court's other six judges.
His attachment was fierce (none of his friends, as Glendinning observes, wrote as much about the Apostles as he did), but at college the effect on his writing was not salutary: his letters ramble among private jokes, his poetry is sentimental, his competition paper did not win a prize.
Ms. Lessing, Mary McGrory once observed, "writes about her own sex with the unrelenting intensity of Simone de Beauvoir, and about sex itself with the frankness and detail of John O'Hara".
