ONE OF THE MOST GRIMLY FUNNY POEMS OF the past century is Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” with its opening salvo about how our parents invariably mess us up. Larkin used a saltier word for “mess,

Four views of modern maternity

IN AN EARLY SCENE IN LYNNE Ramsay’s brutal, beautiful Die My Love, we see Jennifer Lawrence crawling through a sunny, grassy field on all fours, low to the ground like a sultry panther, as we hear a b

SOME DAYS IT SEEMS WE LIVE IN A HORRID WORLD where most humans couldn’t give a fig about art. How many people in that world are going to care about a 65-year-old black-and-white movie—one that, for an

Aristocratic scaring

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