I got out a calculator and worked out that superficially, on my current income, I earn around £18 an hour – if you think I work a standard 40 hour week, that is.
But in films as superficially different as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons and Dirty Pretty Things, he's shown an interest in certain recurrent themes and situations, among them the taking of moral decisions in precarious situations, the secret manipulation of other people's lives and the ironic, usually unintended, consequences of our everyday actions.
I won't lie or be superficially optimistic about my experience leaving the comfort of the place where I grew up.
And there are more onions to go with the collective guilt: "Perhaps if I rubbed my typewriter superficially with onion juice, it might communicate an intimation of the onion smell which in those years contaminated all Germany... preventing the smell of corpses from taking over completely".
Of course, by the time I had settled in England, I was (at least superficially) a modern woman, and my tastes favoured Henry James and Virginia Woolf.
For example, the superficially simple sentence "I had dinner with my husband" raise the question of what exactly about this activity made the moment happy.
Eventually, the shape of my body will actually change, not superficially, but structurally, internally, and that new shape will in turn inform who I am continually becoming.
My mother and I were never close but we were able to talk to each other superficially, see each other, and she had a wonderful relationship with my daughter.
"This superficially attractive reform was known in the Treasury in my time," he writes.
