If you’re on the hunt for insurance, pension/retirement and/or savings/investments products, here’s a bit about what Aviva provides:

Insurance
Car Insurance
Life Insurance
Private Health Insurance
Home Insurance
Travel Insurance
Personal Accident Insurance
Pet Insurance
Business Insurance

Savings & Investments
Guaranteed Selection Product
Investment ISA (a stocks and shares ISA that gives you the potential for higher returns than a cash ISA)
Investment Bond (one that allows you to invest a single lump sum)

Pension/Retirement
- Personal Pension
- Stakeholder Pension
- Annuities
- Fixed Term Retirement Plan
- Equity Release
- Income drawdown

If you’re serious about your money, and you’re located in Europe/UK,you’ll want to invest a little time in learning more about Aviva.

On the interminable bus journey, bound for London, Lev practices his English: ‘Excuse me for troubling you.’ Do you have anything you could give me?’ ‘I’am legal. ‘Lev home country has just entered the EU and now he, like so many others, is heading west. His wife, Marina, has died of leukemia, his five-year-old daughter, Maya, is living with her grandmother and 42-year-old Lev – a farmer lumberyard worker, now one of Eastern Europe’s long-term unemployed – is traveling to London to find work.

Grey with exhaustion, Lev arrives in a dustry, midsummer city. Hope and envy jostle within him. As he told Lydia, his companion on the journey: ‘I’m going to their country now and I’m going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck. ‘Things, however, do not start well: almost all his savings are used up on his first night in the city, spent in an Earl’s Court B & B. on his upper after only 24 hours, he gate a job delivering leaflets for a kebab shop, for which he’s paid £2 a leaflet. He sleeps on the street. Desperate,lonely and grieving, he slips into poignant, wishful dreaminess.

Bit by bit, Lev gets himself on his feet and so begins a peripatetic, somes comic, often painful, journey through London, which it really feels to be a foreigner and the rage that being dependent on other can in duce. Lev is rescued from the streets by Lydia, who is now staying in the comparative paradise of Muswell Hill with Tom, an English psychotherapist, and Tom’s girlfriend, Larissa a yoga teacher from Lev and Lydia’s country. Tremain handless this culture clash with adroitness and humor: sitting on Tom’s lavatory, Lev relieves himself “as quietly as he could. The idea the he was taking a sh-t in the flat of an English psychotherapist made him feel very mildly afraid’.

Through Lev’s eyes, we see London as the newcomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken its inhabitations obsessed by status and success. As Lev’s Irish landlord Christy says, with some prescience: ‘Life’s didn’t used to be like this, but now they are. If you can’t get your ball in the back of the net, you’re no one. Which is pretty much how Lev, working as a kitchen porter, is made to feel. At Lydia’s invitation, he goes to a concert at the Festival Hall, but is force to flee when his new mobile phone goes off in the expectant silence just as the conductor, for whom Lydia is working, takes the podium. On another occasion, his girlfriend takes him to the opening night of a friend’s feted new play, only to shame Lev for leaving the price tag on his new suede jacket.

As Lev fearfully and tentatively navigates this strange new city still mourning his wife, who died at only 36, he get know other Londoners. Ahmed, is a Muslim kebab-shop owner struggling to keep his business afloat in the post-9/11 world. Christy is a divorced Irish plumber who resents his upwardly mobile ex-wife and pines for his daughter; and Sophie is a young chef with a lizard tattoo who flirts with the restaurant’s celebrity guests but fusses over elderly people on Sundays at a retirement home called Ferndale Heights. Rudy, one of the Ferndale residents, is a rich old woman whose grown children neglect her. When Lev accompanies Sophie on her visits, Rudy confides her “guilt at how useless my life has been” and share memories of the childhood in India, particularly a school pageant for the British viceroy, when she held half of the letter “O” in a welcome sign. “I sometimes think,” she confides, “that’s all your life has amounted to, Ruby Constant, being half of something.”

Lev meets other economic migrants: a Russian woman on her own path to self-reinvention, who looks “determinedly straight ahead, like a gymnast trying to balance on a beam”; a teenage Russian kitchen worker; and two Chinese field laborers, Jimmy and Sonny, who laugh as they harvest asparagus, offering living proof that you can create your own happiness, even in far-from- happy circumstances. Tremain understands there’s heroism in the everyday act of survival, and she gradually brings Lev to the point where he can see this for himself.

After sleeping under tree and behind bushes to conserve his meager store of £20 note, Lev moves into an apartment in a “street of choky little houses. Called Belisha Road,” with the lonely Irishman, Christy. He takes a bunk bed in the room Christy’s young daughter had previously Slane, to have been given a child’s room. He wasn’t too embarrassed or proud to lay his head on a pillowcase. “They both longed,” Tremain writes, “to return to a time before the people they loved most were lost.”

After Lev finds a menial job in the chic restaurant where Sophie works, he slowly moves up the chain to vegetable preparer, taking baby steps toward a career as a chef. “I should feel grateful that sawmill closed,” he tells himself. Other – wise he might have ended up like his father, “enslaved to a lumberyard until I died and to the same lunch each day, and to the snow falling and drifting, year on year, falling and drifting in the same remote and backward places”.

Curious baffled, angry honorable, rash and passionate, Lev is a tremendous creation, and to identification, although he is a 40-plus widower and father , with burdens of memory and guilt at his back, Tremain, through her Voltaire’s candied; strange, for Lev is no ingénue, nor is the interested in the strangeness of the British to an outsider.

The novel, too also skewers the character-twisting distortion of celebrity culture; the infantile greed, materialism and success-worship of so much of contemporary life. Sophie, the sassy, sexy and generous colleague in the modish kitchen of “GK Ashe” who becomes Lev’s lovers, forsakes him in the end for an up-and-coming Brit-art git, “They didn’t used to be like this, but now they are,” says Lev’s Stewart, tea-brewing Irish landlord Chrisy, about these result-fixated modern “Brits”. “If you can’t get your ball in the back of the net, you’re no one.”

The Road Home on occasion switches from sad clique to Swiftian satire. The follies of conceptual art and avant-garde drama both draw raking fire. At the Royal Court, Lev storms righteously out of the press night of a fashionable shock-fest laden with viciously-parodied scenes of cruelty and abuse: “it’s probably my age, but I just feel weary with’ “he says.

On reading a novel by Rose Tremain, one suspect that what is torture for so many writers comes naturally to her. She has written about a dozen novels, set in different eras and places. Tremain writes as effortlessly and rhythmically as she breathes, tackling the serious misery of a hidden homesickness with a light and humane touch but with a firm grasp of the day-to-day realize and a rare ability to enter into the complex emotional world of the stranger. She’s on Lev’s side. English has made him a chef, but when is gratitude ever enough to overcome the longing to go back to one’s own country? Tremain writes so beautifully about Lev’s passage from near-destitution to success that it seems perverse to complain that she hasn’t made her book uglier. If The Road Home seems a slightly idealized version of a migrant worker’s journey (half through, Lev takes to reading Hamlet), it is a version filled with emotional richness, complex sensibility and a passionate insistence on the humanity of the poor, the unattractive, the flawed and the dispossessed.

This book is available online @Amazon.

The Social Network might be remembered as a film that came out too early. Its real-life drama is still ongoing. The film’s drama centre sod Facebook’s founding and the Internet revolution that followed. Two of its four founders – Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) – get most of the screen time. Reportedly, Zuckerberg wished filmmakers wouldn’t make his biopic while he was still alive. Not an unreasonable wish considering that The Social Network is character assassination masquerading as compelling social commentary. Story is far more important to director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin. A good story outweighs everything else, the truth especially.

Within the first five minutes of The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). After posts a few bitchy blog comments about Erica, and hacks Harvard University’s databases with Eduardo Saverin’s help. His hacking creates Face Mash, a website where Harvard woman can be ranked by their hotness. The site gets so much traffic it crashes Harvard’s network in a few hours. Impressed, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence) and their associate Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) offer Mark the chance to program their own social networking site, Harvard Connection. Mark agrees to work with them, but never does. Instead, he goes to Eduardo with a social networking idea of his own, and after Eduardo’s thousand-dollar investment, facebook is born. The website’s popularity explodes in weeks and when the Winklevoss twins and Divya get wind of it, they’re ready to sure to sue Mark for stealing their idea. As Facebook grows it acquires a president – Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster. it turns into an online empire as Parker’s influence on the company grows. And the inevitable break down of Mark and Eduardo’s partnership turns into one of the most infamous break-ups in corporate history.

Most of the performances in The Social Network are solid enough. Jesse Eisenberg has made a career of playing likeable nerd. Here he plays an unlikeable one. As Mark he talks a mile a minute, spewing pretentious, snarky observations. It’s sometimes hard to see the genius underneath all the dialogue. But Zuckerberg is more than just a whiz kid who understands codes. He can see the future because he will be friend to get there, then that’s just part of the journey. While Eisenberg plays Mark with an irritating energy, Andrew Garfield’s job is to play Eduardo with more calm. Unfortunately, this calm makes Garfield blend in with the wallpaper for most of the film. Eduardo does have one incredible moment, though you have to wait until almost the end of The Social Eduardo confronts Mark and their friendship finally crumbles, he breaks down. Garfield isn’t scenery chewing. It’s the kind of surprising scene that redeems flawed films.

The most arresting performances come from Armie Hammer and Josh Pence. The faces of the Winklevoss twins are played by Armie Hammer while Josh Pence body doubles as Tyler Winklevoss. You won’t spot the body double, but the seamless face technology may well become David Fincher’s trademark, since he also digitally aged Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Technology aside, Hammer plays the Winklevoss twins as polished preps with easy charm. Hammer will probably spend his career playing senator and blue bloods. While the Winklevoss twins are privileged brats, they also inject an absurd humor into The Social Network. Zuckerberg’s theft was probably the best thing that ever happened to them – it’s likely nobody would have heard of the Winklevosses otherwise.

While The Social Network features an ensemble cast, it really rises and falls with Sorkin’s screenplay. The dialogue feels written, if such a thing is possible. It grates on the ears and reads better than it sounds. The story itself barrels on and on, nearly going off the rails until the third and final act. Basically, The Social Network feels like two separate films. The first two-thirds give you little room to reflect and the last third is a slowly unraveling tragedy. The ending is stunning and surprisingly silent. Its triumphant and tragic as a billionaire inventor is held emotionally captive by his own creation. The surprising thing about The Social Network is how hard and fast the nerd live. Harvard life is a string of parties filled with dot-com groupies. The film isn’t an endorsement of Ivy League schools, Silicon Valley, on the geeks who infest them. These upstarts are made out as possible no matter how charming some of them may be. It’s as if the film is indicting an entire generation. This is one of its problems. The Social Network has been marked as the film that defines a generation. A film about the internet isn’t enough to pull off that feat. The Social Network isn’t great enough, and the generation it tries to capture can’t only be defined by the websites it uses.

The Facebook saga isn’t over: the Winklevosses have since been hit with their own lawsuit for theft, and they apparently plan to sue Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg all over again. While this emotional drama plays out, the film still feels cold. Caring about these characters is a tough sell. Real or on celluloid, they aren’t likeable enough to love, or evil enough to love to hate.

Watch the movie or get the DVD online @Amazon.

Jillian Larkin’s Vixen is the first novel in The Flapper series, a young adult series set during the Roaring Twenties. The novel is akin to the Luxe and Bright Young Things series by Anna Godbersen, and though it’s Larkin’s debut, it’s smoother and more readable than many other debuts. Considering the rise of paranormals in the young adult market, Vixen gives the impression that Larkin has downright invented the wheel. Regardless of previous work, Vixen is, at the very least a fun scandalous, page-turner.

It’s 1923, and American women have just gotten the right to vote. Booze is illegal, but speakeasies are everywhere. Dresses are short, and hairstyles even shorter. There’s a flapper on every gangster’s arm, and the new music is terrifying old people. This is the Jazz Age. Three young women and the boys who chase them are at the centre of it all in Chicago. Schoolgirl Gloria Carmody dreams of being a fierce flapper, instead of a poor little rich girl about to marry Sebastian Grey, the high-society man of every girl’s dream. She’s been sneaking off to the Green Mill, Chicago’s hottest speakeasy. Her best friend, Lorraine Dyer, is hopelessly in love with Gloria’s other best friend, Marcus. Lorraine’s desperate, jealous scheming threatens to destroy Gloria’s plans of keeping her man and her double life as a flapper all at the same time. In breezes Clara Knowles, Gloria’s sweet-as-pie cousin, who is far more of a dangerous dame than she lets on.

The fun thing about Vixen is that each chapter is a glimpse into each girl’s head. Gloria is the de-facto leader of the entire outfit, and for the first half of Vixen, it is very hard to feel too sorry for her. She comes from one of the wealthiest families in the Windy City and attends the fanciest of private schools. Her biggest problem in life is that she is bored out of her mind and – gasp – about to be married off to an even wealthier version of herself. But the one luxury in life Gloria can’t afford is love. Even the best teenagers want to be bad and for 1920s Gloria, guzzling booze, wearing way too short skirts, chopping off her hair, and dancing the Charleston to scary music with men is shock to high society. Eventually, her new double life forces Gloria to see a part of society she never even noticed, forcing her to re-evaluate the things she values in life. It’s a very subtle character arc and by Vixen’s end, you can’t help but cheer Gloria on.

Lorraine is equally rich, but it is a pity you feel for her by the end, not sympathy. Most of her troubles she’s brought on herself, though Lorraine acts like a victim. It’s Gloria’s and Clara’s fault that she can’t get Marcus. Of course, it’s nobody’s fault. Lorraine still hasn’t figured out that sometimes the object of your affection simply doesn’t care if you exist.

As for Clara Knowles, she’s the biggest mystery of all. Her parents have sent her to Chicago after she ran off to New York City to become a flapper. She’s put in charge of her cousin Gloria’s wedding, and her aunt has threatened her with reform school if she doesn’t shape up. So Clara has to play at being the good girl despite being tempted by Marcus’ charms. Which means she’s left to watch Gloria play at being a flapper, knowing that Gloria is on the same path of destruction. But exactly what Clara’s destruction is remains deliciously unclear.

Stripping down the 1920s into an enjoyable read for the young adult crowd is no easy task. There’s heavy stuff like feminism, race, and class. Tackling those subjects can lead to automatic preachiness, but Larkin has admirably packed all that density into one book. She makes all these issues centre stage at the Green Mill without ever making it obvious. What reads as a dance between races is likely more allegorical than Vixen would ever let on. Young women putting off marriage and chasing their own dreams while their mothers wither away in loveless marriages is statement enough about the changing times. But Vixen is also an irreverent send-up to Jazz Age pop culture. There’s the endlessly entertaining 1920s slang, and the swishy, fabulous outfits, which are described in stunning detail. There are references to the icons of the era: Buster Keaton and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s better than a history lesson, and a thousand times more fun.

There are boys to die for – high-society beaus and broody bandleaders. The 1920s were fun and fabulous, but also dangerous. The gun molls were deadlier than the hired guns. Vixen’s plot reads a lot like previous 1920s series, which can be a little stale if you’re already a fan of books set in the era. But Larkin’s work is still the cat’s meow, an addictive addition to the glitzy historical Gossip Girl hybrid genre. Its sequel, Ingénue, was released recently too.

“Ye who are weary, come home.”

Home is a tender and profoundly nostalgic text about family and the passing of generations. It is set in the 1950s in the town of Gilead, Iowa, and told mainly from the point of view of Glory Boughton, a school teacher who has returned home to nurse her ailing father after her five-year-long romance has failed. She is 38 years old. Her older brother Jack, something of a renegade, shows up also. He has not been home for 20 years. Jack has a history of alcoholism and petty theft but is a charming and endearing character. Glory undertakes to please him too, and the Boughtons spend some weeks together that are written about with simplicity and extraordinary detail. Old Mr. Boughton is a Presbyterian Reverend and the text accommodates some meditations on love and death and faith.

This book has something retro about it since it is set in the fifties and centres on the problems of dealing with an alcoholic family member. Some beautiful passages evoke the prairies. Robinson writes:

The next morning Jack was out in the garden early, cutting back weeds head high, gaunt shafts of plants with masses of tiny flowers on them, dusty lavender, droning with bees. And there would be black-eyed Susan, and nettles and milkweed and jewelweed and brambles and some avid vine that wilted in sunlight and broke at the slightest touch, leaving tiny whiskers of thorn in the hand that touched it.

Robinson’s previous novel Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize. It told the story of Reverend Boughton’s neighbour John Ames and evoked the prairie town with luminous prose. These passages about the natural world of the Iowa town are some of the loveliest in the latest novel, and Robinson’s careful depiction of the relationship between the two old men is brilliantly handled. Home continues where Gilead left off, zoning in on relationships in the Boughton family and the weariness that brings wounded family members to seek out their childhood place of nurturing. Robinson says:

She felt sorry for her father, happy as he was. It was hard work talking to jack. So little in his childhood and youth could be mentioned without discomfort, his twenty-year silence was his to speak about if he chose to, but they were prepared to appreciate his discretion if any account of it might have caused more discomfort still. Then there was the question “Why are you here?” which they would never ask. Glory thought, why am I here? How cruel it would be to ask me that.

The deft touches of prairie life across the years are welcome in this tale of minute emotional crises. They help to balance the main narrative and keep the reader’s focus tuned to the suffering of the adult characters. Memories abound and are beautifully recorded. For example, Robinson writes joyously of the Gilead of old when she says:

The sky was blue, the terraced hills glittered with new corn, and the pastures the cows were standing with their calves or lying in the mingled, muddied shade of oak trees. “Well, I’d almost forgotten it all,” the old man said. “It’s good to get out of the house from time to time. Ames will enjoy it.” He talked for a while about the old Gilead. It was the smell that reminded him. There used to be chicken coops and rabbit hutches behind every house almost, and people kept milk cows, and there was enough open land right in town to be plowed with a horse or a mule and planted corn. You knew the animals around town just like you knew the children, and if some old she-goat was grazing in the flower garden, well, you knew you her and she knew you and you could just walk her home.

These passages add to the retro feel of the novel.

Robinson writes with an eye to the fine detail and her text is a pleasure to read simply for the sheer joy of the writing. However, I found the story a bit slow and repetitive and the character Jack somewhat tedious in his forever excuses and self-detracting statements. He wants to be the centre of attention always, it would seem, and speaks with his hand to his face most of the time, a gesture that gets annoying in its repetition. I believe he is intended to be an anti-hero of some proportions, but if this be the case, he is really not sufficiently interesting to pull it off.

On the other hand, Glory and her housewifely ways are always a pleasure. She cooks chicken and dumplings in order to fill the house with a familiar childhood aroma and so comfort the old father and Jack. She makes pots of coffee to warm them, and pancakes to treat them to special breakfasts. Glory is a pious woman (though she rejects the word as applied to herself), and the old Reverend will leave the house to her when he dies. Glory is surprised by this gesture, and deeply conflicted. Does she want the old house to have a place for herself that is home also to other siblings, or is she frightened to be trapped in the old house? Only the future can tell as it manifests itself.

Glory, meanwhile, is caught up in memories of the past that made the old house home. She thinks of her grandmother:

She’d eat kidney when she find it. Tongue. Mutton. In spring she’d be out in the fields, along the fences, picking dandelion greens as soon as the sun was up. She’d come in with her apron full of purslane. My mother thought it was embarrassing. She’d say, “You’d think we didn’t feed her” but she always did what she wanted to do.

The healing of these two characters in the home is the real subject of this glowing text, and if it is a bit slow and repetitive, it does not really detract from the moving aspect of the telling. This is a woman’s book, about nature of family and the healing power of love.

Marilynne Robinson has also written Housekeeping and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

This book is available online @Amazon.

Undoubtedly, this book is perfect for anyone who dreams of “putting up” their favorite fruits for future use (in the kitchen). It’s arranged by season for the ‘freshest results’. For example, Spring is time for rhubarb, strawberries, apricots and other eagerly anticipated fruits inventively combined into rosemary-scented marmalades, orange-blossom jams and good old solid preserves.

Also included are marmalades of bergamot, pink grapefruit and Meyer lemons, with Saunders providing in-depth explanations and many recipe variations, including information on rare as well as common fruits.

This cookbook is available online @Amazon.

Reliving the future’s past through a constellation of references to jazz, psychedelic funk, hip hop, and techno, the music of Cosmogramma never fixates long enough to crystallize; any groove that spontaneously emerges is quickly subverted, churned up in favour of creating new maps and new vectors, new prisms through which to experience forms of music we’ve all heard before.

Best tracks: Computer Face/Pure Being; Tennis; Satelllliiiiiiiteee

This album is available online: iTunes | Amazon

The album is being talked about in certain circle as a album of the year, but this is no release to shout about from the rooftops- its grip soft and easily shrugged off by those who choose to pay it only passing attention. Live with it a while, though, and High Violet rewards patience with songs that colour one’s waking existence, becoming vivid night-time narrative when curtains are drawn.

Those who’ve embraced Matt Berninger’s baritone, and subsequently each fascinating detail that trails in its wake, have discovered a band for life – for love and loss, euphoric highs and exhausting lows. For everything, always. Berninger’s lyrics are incredibly engaging; but his stories, delivered with wrenching sincerity, form the first point entry for newcomers awaiting enlightenment. High Violet is an album characterized largely by absence, and displacement – of being someplace other than ideal. It is the sound of a band taking a mandate to be meaningful rock band seriously, and they play the part so fully that, to some, it may be off-putting. But these aren’t mawkish, empty gestures; they’re anxious, personal songs projected onto wide screens.

Best tracks: Terrible Love; Bloodbuzz Ohio; English

This album is available online: iTunes | Amazon

An Education is about growing up, and breaking out. Its 16-year-old Jenny Mellor’s (Carey Mulligan) coming-of-age, just as it is Carey Mullingan’s and Danish director Lone Scherfig’s – Oscar nomination, and with Scherfig’s directing earning the film a best picture Oscar nomination. Set in early 1960s England, An Education is based on journalist Lynn Barber’s 2003 personal essay. At times the film is well-crafted, flawlessly acted; only to be ruined by characters add a story frustratingly out of emotional reach. Worse, you’re left wondering why you should care about any of it. It’s a whole lot of nothing; its style over substance that by the end will leave you asking “so what?”

Jenny Mellor is a middle-class English schoolgirl from Twickenham. Her strict parents Jack and Marjorie (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) are obsessed with her education. They fuss over her o”levels and A”levels, press her to study Latin, and force her to join the orchestra. All this in the hopes of Jenny getting into Oxford. On a rainy afternoon, with a cello in hand after an orchestra rehearsal, a stranger, David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard) offers her a lift. He is friendly, seemingly genuinely interested in her tales about school. As Lynn Barber remembered, little did she realize that her being a schoolgirl was precisely why David was so interested? David is nearly twice her age, but he soon persuades her parents to let him take her out on Friday and Saturday nights to the opera, clubs art auctions, five star restaurants, and eventually even a weekend in Paris. The real David Goldman took Lynn Baber as far as Amsterdam and Bruges. Over the course of their escapades Jenny meets David’s business associate Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Danny’s worldly and fashionable girlfriend, Helen (Rosamund Pike). Before long Jenny learns that David and his friends aren’t rich sophisticates, but something far sleazier.

Even though Carey Mulligan was 22 at the time of shooting she seizes upon Jenny’s innocent adolescence perfectly. She starts off as a giggling, clever schoolgirl. She speaks perfect French, even though she has ever been to France, and has an affinity for classical art. She’s smarter than everyone around her, but has had no real life experiences. She’s all theory and no practice. After meeting David, Jenny morphs into a stylish sophisticate who dances at jazz clubs and jets off to Paris an weekends. It isn’t just the hairdos and designer dresses that make Jenny seem older as time goes by – it’s the way Mulligan holds her cigarette or over time starts to look directly into Sarsgaard’s eyes.

But sophisticate doesn’t make a girl into a woman, even if she ends up engaged.

Aside from the dodgy English absent, Peter Sarsgaard does a capable job as David. At first, it’s easy to see why Jenny wants him. He’s interested in her and her parents, he drives a Bristol, and he’s Jewish – to Jenny this is exotic because she’s never met a Jew before. David has beguiling finesses that Sarsgaard plays with ease. It’s remarkable that with each amoral character he plays, Sarsgaard can still pull you into his web, despite your doubts and suspicions.

While Jenny might be easily taken with David her parents reaction is far more surprising. Despite David’s vagueness about his profession and the considerable age gap between him and Jenny, her parents are eager for them to be together. There are never any objections to their relationship, not even any tough questions. It’s as if Jack and Marjorie Mellor want to be fooled. As Lynn barber describes her parents – they were new to the middle class and they were determined that their daughter remained there or move up. An education might be the great equalizer, but in the pre-feminist, pre-swinging London era of the 1960s good husband was an even better equalizer.

Jenny and David’s affair in An Education is a by-product of the gender inequalities and class barriers of the 1960s. The film, however, barely addresses any of these issues. Class only manifests itself in Jenny’s parent’s desire to get her to Oxford. They remember how hard life was during the war, but their acceptable alternative presents itself with David. What girl needs an education or a job after she’s been married off?

Like most coming-of –age films An Education is predictable. You can see it all coming before Jenny’s desire to go to Paris is predictable. Paris seems to be only dream destination for every lonely, desperate Anglophone in film and literature. The real Jenny actually journeyed top Bruges and Amsterdam and yet it is Paris – once again – that is romanticized. The film’s other problem is that it can’t figure out its tone. Its one part light-hearted romp and one part up it nearly clashes with the film’s (and Jenny’s) world view. It’s not totally convincing.

Lone Scherfig does give an excellent representative of the 1960s – from the designer dresses to the drab school uniforms. An Education captures the spirit of England’s 1960s but in it desperate effort for sentimental nostalgia it glides over the inequalities and class warfare. For all its charm, the film, like Barber’s essay, feel pointless. It’s difficult to care about another schoolgirl getting the run-around from an older man. It’s an average and forgettable film with a few shining performances.

Sure, critics have opined that the album is scatterbrained and lack focus, but this is Xtina we’re speaking of; in her mind, there seems to be no genre of music she can’t do. And with a voice like hers, who can blame her? On Bionic, sex remains her forte, but on tracks like the endlessly beautiful You Lost Me, she goes back to a vulnerability last seen on Stripped, her classic 2002 break-out album. The album’s title track is explosive and catchy, sounding just like something from Santigold’s debut (she had a hand in creating the track); Woohoo with Nicki Minaj sees her coasting atop a dancehall-lite beat care of Polow da Don; while on Elastic Love, she sounds just like MIA, who shares writing credits willingness to experiment with her sound and her voice, the alum is forward-thinking, playful and fun.

Best track: Woohoo; Elastic Love; You Lost Me

This album is available online: iTunes | Amazon