• LIFE

  Isis thwarted

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 26/12/2019

  » Until the 20th century, jihadists had no bones to pick with the US. Their ire was directed at the UK and France who coveted their lands, and the Jews trying to carve out their own. They got good press when T.E. Lawrence led the Arabs against the enemy Ottoman Turks. The silent film The Sheik romanticised them. The Riffs were favoured in their uprising against Spain. They didn't participate in the North African campaign in World War II.

• LIFE

  Up to par

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 01/11/2019

  » The first thing I did when becoming a newspaper film reviewer was to import a shortcut from the West: evaluating movies with stars. One Trink star was for the very worst motion picture, five Trink stars for the very best. Which was followed by a paragraph explanation. Readers approving my cinema tastes thus knew on what to spend -- or save -- their earnings.

• LIFE

  Too ambitious

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 20/09/2019

  » We are told as children that we must have ambition to make something of ourselves. What we aren't told is that it must have its limits. To be sure, most people are too lazy to make the effort needed to fulfil it. They figure that just getting along is enough. Anyway, they tell themselves that the odds are stacked against them. That those who succeeded did so by cheating or were just lucky.

• LIFE

  What if?

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 25/07/2019

  » A cine buff -- contemporary, silent, foreign -- since my childhood in the Big Apple, still with a good but not photographic memory, I recall a French movie about a wealthy widow who decided to satisfy her curiosity by looking up her old boyfriends. She wondered what would her life have been like had she married one of them.

• LIFE

  Targeted billionaires

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 08/06/2018

  » When a rich man meets his maker, I pause for few moments, not to mourn his life but to wonder what becomes of his wealth. Of no use to him now, is it buried with him? Like the pharaohs, he intends for it to accompany him in his next life? Is it inherited by his son? To do what with?

• LIFE

  Big city, small town

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 11/05/2018

  » People are natural actors. Observe how they tell stories to their friends, passing on telephone conversations or what they saw or heard. They mimic and flap their arms for emphasis. Hoping for smiles or groans. Novelists aim to do the same with more words. Alas, only the better ones succeed. All too many try and fail.

• LIFE

  How to get rich

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 09/02/2018

  » During the Great Depression in the Big Apple, one of the games we played was choosing our role model among the comic strip heroes we all read. Dick Tracy, Superman and Batman got most voted. They scoffed when I picked Daddy Warbucks, the billionaire who adopted Little Orphan Annie. (“Yeah, how many bad men did he catch?”)

• LIFE

  Food for thought

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 05/01/2018

  » A corporal motorcycle courier on the Western Front during World War I, Hitler fancied himself the German Napoleon Bonaparte. While he had good political instincts, a military genius he was not. Still, he had several first-rate strategists and tacticians on his staff.

• LIFE

  The 18-year itch

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 21/12/2017

  » Contrary to poems and films, love isn't the only reason for marriage. Nor is it the strongest. Arranged marriage takes precedence. So does making the girl pregnant and doing the right thing. Indeed there's a list of reasons, not least lust -- the sap running in both the male and female.

• LIFE

  A Chinese empire?

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 17/11/2017

  » As a youngster in the Big Apple during the Great Depression, I recall men with billboard signs with "The world is coming to an end -- REPENT". The people they passed on the streets shrugged them off. l didn't fully understand what it meant, but I knew that threats aren't to be taken lightly.

1 2 3 4 5 Next Last