[...] The girls sing without facial affect; dead-eyed, unsmiling. Around us the bored schoolboys skulk. Nobody speaks to them or takes their picture. The teacher does not worry that boredom and disaffection may turn to resentment and violence: "Oh, no, they are very happy for the girls."

It is a frustration for activists that Liberians have tended not to trace their trouble back to extractive foreign companies or their government lobbies. Liberians don't think that way. Most Liberians know how much a rubber tapper gets paid: thirty-five American dollars a month. [...]

"[...] The whole reason Firestone came to Liberia in the first place was as a means of creating a permanent supply of rubber for the American military. The British had increased the taxes on Malaysian rubber--the Americans didn't want to pay that. They needed a permanent solution. So they planted the rubber--it's not native to Liberia. Really, they created a whole industry. It sounds strange, but these are some of the best jobs in Liberia."

Englishman: [...] Maybe we could just give them a few things ... a nice bed, bedsheets, something so they won't be bitten to death at night. [...]

Liberian: My friend, someone's going to get malaria. It's inevitable. [...] I ask you please not to worry about malaria--we get it all the time in Liberia. I promise you we are used to it!

The history of Liberia consists of elegant variations on this conversation.

[...] I cannot honestly say I feel proud to be white and ashamed to be black or proud to be black and ashamed to be white. I find it impossible to experience either pride of shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I understand how those words got into the racial discourse, but I can't sign up to them. I'm not proud to be female either. I am not even proud to be human---I only love to be so. As I love to be female and I love to be black, and I love that I had a white father.

[...] A hesitation in the face of difference, which leads to caution before difference and ends in fear of it. Before long, the only voice you recognize, the only life you can empathize with, is your own. [...] I believe that flexibility of voice leads to a flexibility in all things. My audacious hope in Obama is based, I'm afraid, on precisely such flimsy premises.

They meet in the Borghese gardens, dappled in leafy light, the scene of a Shakespearean comedy.

This is no fault of the actress herself, whose comeliness is as self-evident and insistent as the wafting cherry blossom and the orange lanterns floating on pellucid water, the sumptuous silk of the kimono and the trimmed perfection of the formal gardens--all of which we are repeatedly encouraged to appreciate until you begin to feel that if something ugly does not appear on-screen soon you might go quite out of your mind.

[...] "I did it for my family" is the most repeated line in this film. Its echo is silent, yet you can't help hearing it: what would you do for yours?

Lean's sad, buttoned-up account of unconsummated love is about all of us and our cautious natures. It's not that the English don't want true love or self-knowledge. Rather unlike our European cousins, we will not easily give up the real for the dream. We remain skeptical about throwing away a concrete asset like Fred in favor of "the faery power of unreflecting love," no matter how much Keats may recommend it. Laura, a Midlands mother of two, is certainly not a fairy by temperament, despite her pixie face. She will not give up the reality of Fred for her love of Alec. Alec, gentleman that he is, quite agrees. An Italian (or indeed, the modern English viewer of the film) will diagnose Laura and Alec as morbidly repressed. The film offers a different hypothesis: that the possibility of two people's pleasure cannot override the certainty of other people's pain. Primum non nocere is the principle upon which the film operates. As a national motto we could do a lot worse.