Radio wasn't outside our lives. It coincided with and helped to shape our childhood and adolescence. As we slogged toward maturity, it also grew up and turned into television, leaving behind, like dead skin, transistorized talk-radio and nonstop music. . . .

Nothing in Death Hunt makes a great deal of sense, though the scenery is rugged and the snowscapes beautiful.

There's no doubt about it. Arcadia is Tom Stoppard's richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and, new for him, emotion. It's like a dream of levitation: you're instantaneously aloft, soaring, banking, doing loop-the-loops and then, when you think you're about to plummet to earth, swooping to a gentle touchdown of not easily described sweetness and sorrow.

We are drawn to Twitter the way we are drawn to the scene of an accident.

Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.

[His acting] remains forever fixed in a time that never dates.