★★★☆☆

'The spirit of the allotment lives on in the English love affair with the back garden. All across the country, every day, people reap and sow, prune and mow, seed and dig their little patches of well-watered ground. The very word 'garden' comes from the Old English 'garth', meaning a plot of enclosed land.'

★★★★★ Every person who can ejaculate sperm should read this, no matter their position on abortion.

'Religious belief, like human nature, is complex, changeable, and in many cases flexible, and that is not necessarily a flaw.'

★★★★★

★★★☆☆

'The hilly landscape was gorgeous and extravagantly green. You could be excused for thinking that the principle industry of Britain is the manufacture of chlorophyll. We chauntered along among wooded hills, scattered farms, churches with square towers that made them look like leftover pieces from a very large chess set.'

★★★★☆

★★★★★ Humanising the big fella.

2022 review for Banned Books Week at my library:

A beautifully-composed story of a woman in rural England striving against the unyielding social conventions of her time. As a character, Tess's relentless effort to simply live and love despite very difficult circumstances continues to inspire me.

Tess was censored during the process of publication and banned in several places on both sides of the Atlantic in the years following.

'Modern England is so strewn with the debris of the past that we may be forgiven for ignoring it. Walk along the Thames path at Rotherhithe and you pass the outline of an Edwardian manor house - a stone building that once overlooked the river. It belonged to Edward III [1312-1377], not Edward VII [1841-1910]. Yet it does not feel out of place between the wings of a modern housing estate.'

★★★☆☆ My third or fourth reading of this book, I believe. Unfortunately, it was just middle-of-the road for me this time, probably due to the fact that my attitudes to religion, monarchy, and fiction have changed so much over the last decade. Not a bad story, but I don't see it as great anymore either.

★★★★★ Imagine what readers, teachers, librarians, and publishers thought when this, a children's picture book about the building of a fictional medieval French cathedral illustrated in black and white pen-and-ink, was released in 1973. The text is accompanied by large-scale drawings of stunning birds-eye views interspersed with instructional sketches of life on the ground. It must have blown everyone's minds. It was named a Caldecott Honor book.⬇️

'We hear this quite often, that only time can solve this problem.... Well the people who argue this do not themselves realize that time is neutral, that it can be used constructively or deconstructively. At points the people of ill will, the segregationists, have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. ⬇️

'[Chaucer] was not a poet who happened to be a diplomat and government official; he was a government official and diplomat who, in his spare time, happened to write poetry.'

★★★★☆

★★★☆☆

'Where [John Paul II] surprised everybody was in his berserk canonizations of everyone in sight: quite apart from the 1,340 men and women whom he beatified, the first step to sainthood, he canonized no fewer than 483 new saints, more than had been made in the previous five centuries.'

★★★☆☆

★★★★☆

★★★☆☆

Pro: I liked the format: a short anthology of writings by various authors examining the issue from different perspectives.

Cons: It was fairly binary and could have benefited from more examples of the messiness of morality. It was published in 2001 and often refers to events of its time so it's somewhat outdated now.

'No one could build an abbey overnight. [The Cistercians] who laid the foundations needed a loving belief in a brighter future and a patient sense of self-sacrifice, since they knew they would never see the end product of their labours. Their keen sense of the endless, fluctuating passage of time gave them immortal longings, and made them unusually industrious.'

'The Challenge Episode appears to us as a series of humiliations and discomfitures for the court which we feel as more comic than tragic. Despite the fact that the challenge is successfully met, the Green Knight departs from the scene as the victor in a kind of psychological warfare.'

'Nature moves in mysterious ways, not all of them natural.'

'The cultural impact of [Bede's] work is hard to overstate. For instance, it is chiefly thanks to him that England is so called, as a different monk might have seen things from a Jutish or Saxon perspective, rather than the Anglian angle. And it was Bede's use of 'anno domini' to describe the years after the birth of Christ that established this as the accepted notation. ⬇

★★★★☆

★★★★★

'By some curious alchemy, [The Seventh Seal] seemed not only to speak to my condition with a precision that was almost hallucinatory, it said what I would have said could I have articulated and organised it by myself.' 1/2

'Generally the screen was for entertainment: for the real stuff of thought you opened a book. Bergman upended all that in the one film.'

'Bergman has a deep seriousness about intense emotional relationships which I find sympathetic and with which I find it easy to identify.'

'We must take him at his word and see The Seventh Seal from the outset as Bergman's attempt to keep... the link between creation and worship and the link between the mid-twentieth century, the Middle Ages, the New Testament and much deeper into the past.'

'The grounds we offer for our behavior poorly reflect actual motives. In Pascal's elegant phrasing, "The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing."'

'The curry arrived and I focused my attention on it. Mother had grown tired of the lecture, and asked Dad to talk about something else. "But the world is about to end!" he said. He was shouting now. "Of course it is," Mother said. "But let's not discuss it over dinner."'

Like his films, Bergman's memoir dokuments the varieties of human life in an artistically honest way, even the elements we typically avoid or don't acknowledge.

Having closed the book a few minutes ago, my overwhelming feeling is of a warm kinship with young Ingmar. In a different time and place, I think I would have been the best of friends with him. ⬇

I didn't know my favourite director and favourite actor crossed paths!

'Practically every morning, I met Lord Olivier at breakfast. For me, it was instructive. [He] held seminars over our cups of coffee and lectured me on the subject of Shakespeare. My enthusiasm knew no bounds. ⬇

'Life has precisely the value one puts on it.'

'So now the village genius from Sweden was sitting at the Comédie Française watching The Misanthrope in a youthful, beautiful and emotional performance. The experience was indescribable. The dry alexandrines blossomed and thrived.... Molière stepped into my heart to remain there for the rest of my life. The spiritual circulation of my blood, previously linked to Strindberg, now opened an artery to Molière.'

Instantly reminded me of Michael Haneke's film Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon), which to me has always seemed Bergmanesque.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Ribbon

'Most of our upbringing was based on such concepts as sin, confession, punishment, forgiveness and grace, concrete factors in relationships between children and parents and God. There was an innate logic in all this which we accepted and thought we understood.... So punishments were something self-evident, never questioned. They could be swift and simple... but they could could also be extremely sophisticated, refined through generations.'

I was surprised by how much Ullmann's portrayal of her father's last months affected me. In the patterns of his reasoning and speech I was reminded of my grandfather at the same period in his life. My grandfather was born the same year as Ullmann's father and died almost exactly two years after him but because my grandfather rarely spoke to me and Ullmann's father was a public figure, unfortunately I know more about the latter than the former.

'I will exercise caution in describing her. She will want to do that herself. Every once in a while she baffles me with a look so infinitely her, an *other* altogether, right in the midst of her childhood, relentless in its grip, and even though she will soon abandon it, or it will abandon her, it will follow her for the rest of her life.'

'She doesn't dare say that the garden is the reason she rented this house in the first place, doesn't dare say that it took her forever to find precisely this house and this garden, that everything was supposed to be perfect this time, doesn't dare say that while still in Oslo, she had sent for real estate brochures, twenty, maybe more, with photographs of houses and gardens and trees and rooms, ⬇

'It's fantastic, you know, that over the years I've built up such a collection... all these books... music... all these records on my shelves.'

'...her father is rarely angry with her. But he can get very angry, He has a bloody temper, the mother says, he can fly into a rage and shout, but the girl knows where the anger is and dodges it. She is skinny. Skinny like a filmstrip, the father says.'

I opened this book because I wanted to learn about Liv and Ingmar but I encountered so much more: a lively and honest voice sharing accomplishments and doubts, a strong woman who cut her own path through the forest of life, including the tangle of single motherhood and Hollywood. I'm looking forward to reading her follow-up memoir, Choices.

The Knopf edition I read was beautifully designed by Camilla Filancia.

'I wanted to open my arms and embrace it all, but because my fear that it would never be mine was so great, it never became mine.'

'I sit by the window and look down at the beach below. Smile and think of another evening spent with one I loved under a spruce tree because we had nowhere else to go. Our clothes were covered with moss and grass and we laughed and were happy and alone in the world.'