"If you haven’t read Trollope, this is a good place to begin. Along with Can You Forgive Her?, The Eustace Diamonds is among the most delicious and contemporary of Trollope’s Palliser novels, and like any great classic, it’s crammed to bursting with characters who are remarkably like people you know. Well, maybe you don’t know anyone like Lizzie Eustace—a young woman who cares more about money and jewels than anything else—but I’m afraid I do."

"Charles Laughton’s only film as director, scripted by James Agee from the book by Davis Grubb. It’s a fairy-tale version of a crime-suspense drama, as two children are pursued through a magical, haunted landscape by a demented yet canny preacher (Robert Mitchum). There’s a grown-up story about a stash of stolen money, but Laughton’s masterstroke is to ignore that and present the human monster from the children’s point of view, as a remorseless bogeyman."

"Perhaps the noirest of noir films, and for my money one of the three best American films of the postwar period (the others being Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard). Featuring amazing performances from Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, and a knife-edge bitterness rare in any Hollywood film, it is at once a tribute to nighttime New York City and a devastating portrait of the power of a big-time columnist like Walter Winchell."

"After our son Walker couch-surfed in Rio last year, we felt obliged to take in one of the Brazilian friends he met. She brought a copy of Sebastião Salgado’s beautiful but expensive book Genesis. We felt bad because she doesn’t have a lot of money and also because it is in Portuguese. However, 95% of the book consists of Salgado’s brilliant photographs, which need no translation. It seems that the people with the least often give the most."