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At a later nude scene she made that curious mewing noise with which teenagers indicate that they're grossed out Eeeee

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At a later nude scene, she made that curious mewing noise with which teenagers indicate that they're grossed out ("Eeeee "). And towards the end, when the sexagenarian kneels before Mr Craig, and oral sex seems imminent, the girl flinched back in her seat, her hands - goodness, even her knees - recoiling from the screen action like a dowager confronted by a perfectly horrid beggar.She left the cinema looking shaken, as if she'd witnessed a massacre I've rarely seen embarrassment so tellingly embodied I've never seen human disgust so vividly conveyed. And because of what? Because of age, flesh, the evidence of mortality, the sagging memento mori, the inconvenient fact that sex outlasts youth and beauty Ms Dench, by comparison, is not going to repel anybody. She should grit her teeth, see Langrishe again, and be pleased to note how her 43-year-old raspberry ripples withstand scrutiny 25 years later.Doctor, I keep seeing dangling modifiers...Since I decided, last week, to start monitoring examples of gross grammatical and punctuational mishandlings, examples have come crowding in from all over.

Here's a press release from a toy company that shouts: "Dam Troll's are back... and this time with attitude!!" Here are reported sightings of "Halloween pumpkin's", "Yuletide cracker's" and, slightly unbelievably, "Don't leave it too late for your Xma's shopping!".It seems we've got an epidemic on our hands, one to which we've been awakened by Lynne Truss and her new book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves - The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Once you start being a stickler about these things (I am a stickler; thou art a pedant; he is a sad old git), there's no end to the linguistic abominations around you Suddenly, I see dangling modifiers everywhere. In The Spectator, for instance, there's an ad for Boris Johnson's collected writings: "Vigorous, idiosyncratic, always intelligent and informed, with a very interesting perspective on our time, we offer Spectator readers signed copies..." (enough about how marvellous you are - what's the book like?).My favourite syntactical balls-up, however, comes from the London Evening Standard, where, above the cover splash, there's a charmingly ambiguous special offer "FREE SOUP!" yells the come-on line "For every reader worth up to £2.85." It makes you wonder. How much are Independent readers worth?Beckham gets bookedDavid Beckham's British publisher, HarperCollins, is understandably over the moon about the news that his book, My Side, has hit the top of the bestseller lists in China. Printed on recycled rice paper and selling for the equivalent of £2, it's currently walking out of bookshops from Beijing to Shanghai.

Will the Chinese try the same enterprising marketing tie-ins as the Japanese? Each volume of the Nipponese edition comes with its own bookmark. On one side is a picture of our hero eating a Dinky car, with the words "I love cars" in a thought-bubble. On the other side of the bookmark is an advertisement for a pet magazine called Rascal What any of this has to do with football, I have no idea Damned inscrutable, your Japanese footie fan More from John Walsh. Art 'saved for the nation' must be where the nation can see it Art 'saved for the nation' must be where the nation can see it Sir: I am not optimistic that the plans mentioned by Simon Tait for making works of art saved from export "accessible to the whole nation" will produce any improvement ("It's going nowhere", 11 November).One very good reason for concentrating art saved for the nation in London museums and galleries, unless it has a special connection with a particular region, is that the capital is easily accessible from most parts of the country.One of the arguments in favour of the move of the Royal Armouries from the Tower of London to Leeds put forward locally was the familiar "Why should they have everything down south?" one. Robin Cook has accused Tony Blair of making dishonest, shallow and cheap arguments to justify next week's controversial state visit to Britain by President George Bush. Writing in The Independent today, the former cabinet minister discloses that a proposed state visit by Bill Clinton was blocked because of the Monica Lewinsky affair.He says: "I was Foreign Secretary at the time the Royal Visits Committee quietly dropped President Clinton from the forward programme of state visits because of his impending impeachment. I don't think the Labour Party would be doing the right thing if it goes down this ridiculous road," she said.A Mori poll suggests that Ms Gavron would come fourth behind Mr Livingstone, Steve Norris and Simon Hughes, the Tory and Liberal Democrat candidates..

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