John Baker’s Blog

In Olivier Dahan’s bio-pic of Edith Piaf, Marion Cotillard turns in a stunning performance as the singer they called the little sparrow.
In fact all the performances in the film are sensitively handled, not least the understated part of Louis Leplée, the night-club owner who ‘discovered’ Piaf, played by Gérard Depardieu.
She was a damaged personality. [...]

A sense of belonging, of having a past that helps to explain you and perhaps went a long way to making and moulding you, comes through strongly in the fiction of such diverse novelists as Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner, of Graham Greene, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Gustav Flaubert. Not to mention contemporary authors like [...]