And there's nothing like a wedding between a future monarch and his steady to get the ceramic flowing.   

With the blessed event a mere 76 days away (which means these exquisite handicrafts will only appreciate in value!), we've collected the very best swag with which you can demonstrate your anglophilia, your aristocratic leanings, and your appreciation of commemorative merchandise.

Get yours now! Here's how to order Kate and Willie's Finest Royal Keepsakes. >>

The cause? High seller expectations and buyer skittishness. Things aren't as bad in the U.K. as in the U.S., but the psychology of home-hunting, like here, has changed.

Could it also affect New York City real estate? The New York Times estimated in November that foreign buyers made nearly one-third of Manhattan's condo purchases in the previous 18 months. One has to think that a weakening British economy might weaken the British pound, which might... you get the picture.

The room is an annex hidden behind the hostess desk at Public Restaurant in Nolita. Stepping through its door—which is unmarked—you feel as though you’ve entered a gentlemen’s club in the 19th century. There’s a faded Oriental carpet on the polished wood floor, and the walls are covered with wooden panels, giant mirrors and tiles. Instead of leather-bound books, rows of wine glasses and bottles of water (from the oldest spring in Alsace) fill the shelves. Cracked orange glass globes hang from the ceiling. Tubs of silver birch and palm fronds decorate the corners behind the sofas. Small wooden tables, topped with dark red Formica, are set with votive candles. A stern-looking bust of a former Mayor, John Hyland, surveys the room from a high pedestal. As I sank down in one of the padded black leather armchairs, I thought of Oscar Wilde: “I am due at the Athenaeum. It is the hour when we sleep there.”

But we were here to eat food and taste wine. Chef Brad Farmerie, who is from Pittsburgh, spent seven years in England, where he worked in such restaurants as Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Chez Nico, the Sugar Club, and the Providores and Tapa Room. His global cuisine reflects influences from Australia and New Zealand as well as Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

You can choose from a selection of around a dozen small plates and order flights of wines to go with them. Or you can have the tasting menu—a red rag to a bull for me. Readers of my last column may remember the tasting-menu dinner for two I had at Joël Robuchon a couple of weeks ago that cost me $813.60. This time, I put on my glasses to double-check the price before ordering. Five courses for $75, including wine. Sounded reasonable.

The wines are chosen by Rubén Sanz Ramiro (who worked at molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal’s the Fat Duck in England) and include many New Zealand, Australian and Spanish vintages. (The selection was far more interesting than those served at Robuchon for an extra $125.) A manager, Jesse, who is from New Zealand, dressed in a black suit and matching shirt, was in charge of the room. It was a bit like having a personal sommelier to run the show. He crouched down in front of a small refrigerator by the door and began searching through the bottles inside. “I think you’ll like this with your first course, eel,” he said eventually, and brought over an Oregon pinot gris (2004) from the Four Graces.

The eel, served in a curved amuse-bouche spoon, was coated with a spicy glaze and topped with pickled bean sprouts and half a soft-boiled quail’s egg. The different layers of texture and taste were remarkable, and the fragrant, flinty taste of the wine complemented this mouthful perfectly.

Mr. Farmerie tops thin, pink strips of raw Tasmanian sea trout with shichimi (a Japanese blend of chilies and spices) and a crunchy English piccalilli made from diced cauliflower, cucumber, onions and vinegar, and seasoned with chili, ginger and turmeric. With this, he serves what he calls “a three-slice pile-up”: hot grilled bread spread with melting brown butter flavored with lemon. It was terrific, served with a lovely vin de Savoie, chenin veilles vignes Raymond Quénard 2005.

A white Château Musar 1998, a Lebanese wine from the Bekaa Valley, was paired with a rich salad made of roasted squash chunks topped with pecans and thin triangles of cotija (a Mexican cheese, a bit like a cross between aged Feta and Parmesan). Pernand-Vergelesses Domaine Rollin 2001, a white Burgundy, accompanied a smoky dashi custard laced with lobster and lime, topped with American caviar.

“It’s food that makes you think, but not think too much,” my companion commented. It was very good. We also loved the paper-thin slices of smoked New Zealand venison carpaccio sprinkled with licorice-pickled onions and served with a Martinborough pinot noir, Ata Rangi 2003.

Another night, I tried some dishes not on the tasting menu. The duck confit and foie gras ballotine was gray and stringy; chorizo, in long, lightly charred grilled slices, was delicious, but it came on room-temperature black beans subtly flavored with chocolate and sprinkled with popcorn that didn’t do much for the dish.

The dessert on the tasting menu was a creamy chocolate espresso panna cotta with kalamansi lime jelly and Kahlua cream in a small glass. The East India Solera Emilio Lustan sherry that Jesse brought with this was splendid but lethal. You can also finish up with a selection of cheeses served with biscuits (we tasted four blue cheeses one night when Jesse said they were the only ones that would hold up against a robust Penfolds).

The Monday Room is designed by the cutting-edge firm AvroKo, who did Public next-door and the restaurants Quality Meats, the Stanton Social, Sapa and the European Union. The name of the restaurant, said Jesse, comes from a friend of the designers, a New Zealander who kept a special room in his offices where he’d go to relax and drink wines on Monday.

Why just on Monday? I could happily come here every night. Luckily, the Monday Room is open throughout the week (except for Sundays), but it’s small, so make a reservation. I wish I could keep it a secret.

Here are the current approval ratings of the most popular and least popular countries, along with their scores from a Quinnipiac survey back in November.

1) England - 77.9 (78.9)

2) Canada - 75.4 (73.4)

3) Israel - 66.5 (68.2)

[skip]

12) Venezuela - 30.3 (30.9)

13) Iraq - 27.1 (25.9)

14) Palestinian Government - 24.3 (23.8)

15) Syria - 23.8 (24.3)

16) Cuba - 21.8 (24.1)

17) North Korea - 15.7 (13.5)

18) Iran - 13.5 (15.5)

The full list is after the jump.

-- Azi Paybarah

1) England - 77.9 (78.9)

2) Canada - 75.4 (73.4)

3) Israel - 66.5 (68.2)

4) Germany - 59.9 (58.1)

5) India - 56.1 (56.6)

6) Mexico - 56.1 (51.4)

7) United Nations - 49.9 (50.4)

8) France - 47.7 (44.6)

9) China - 43.3 (44.2)

10) Russia - 43.1 (46.2)

11) Saudi Arabia - 40.1 (40.4)

12) Venezuela - 30.3 (30.9)

13) Iraq - 27.1 (25.9)

14) Palestinian Government - 24.3 (23.8)

15) Syria - 23.8 (24.3)

16) Cuba - 21.8 (24.1)

17) North Korea - 15.7 (13.5)

18) Iran - 13.5 (15.5)

Barker—whose theatrical ideals and theories paved the way for the foundation of England’s National Theatre—was a Shavian (he produced and directed many G.B. Shaw plays at the original Royal Court Theatre and was a leading actor in them). Shaw’s influence on The Madras House (1909) is clear, particularly in its witty take on stifling social conventions and the role of those tantalizing, mysterious things, women. But the play in turn influenced Shaw, inspiring him to write a companion piece, Misalliance (1910). And what a weird, intelligent, overstuffed comedy with a conscience Madras House turns out to be!

It’s essentially about shopping (and the wage slaves who manufacture the goods). This is the first morally serious play I’ve seen to include a fashion show. The idealistic zealot and sexual cold fish, Philip Madras, is selling the family fashion house and drapery business to an American millionaire. Philip disapproves of haute couture for exploiting women, and resents his perplexed wife simply for being there. He also rejects his inheritance as a symbolic gesture toward a new, spiritual England.

In any other play, Philip would be declared legally insane. Barker describes him in his notes as a man “capable of that least English of dispositions—intellectual passion.” Among others in the crowded cast, there’s Philip’s grieving mother and bumbling, privileged uncle, who can’t keep count of his six unmarried children. There’s a pregnant worker—a proto-feminist—who has to be sacked. (Who can her lover be?) And there’s Philip’s philandering father, Constantine, a Mohammedan convert who abandoned his wife and England to live with various concubines in the Middle East.

Madras House doesn’t have a plot as such. Barker wrote “discussion plays,” and his characters do little else but talk—and talk. (Barker’s modern heir is Tom Stoppard in history-of- Russia mode.) “The things you think when you start to think,” announces Uncle Henry about the irresistibility of women, and Barker gives us a great deal more to think about in his four neatly balanced acts: England and its stifling Puritanism, the hypocrisy of family values, the know-how of American entrepreneurship, the purpose of art and culture, the commercial exploitation of workers, spiritual revolution versus the opiate of shopping. On marketing, women and fashion, Barker was ahead of his time.

The moral of Madras House appears to be that relationships between the sexes are hopeless. (For good measure, our prim hero Philip dislikes men and women, and his wife doesn’t care much for men.) Or we can put it another way: How, the play asks earnestly, can we sublimate all the sexual energy we waste on one another, and so create the time to cure the evils of the world? And if you know the answer to that, tell Harley Granville-Barker.

The Madras House creaks a bit at times—by Jove it does! (And being a woman is jolly difficult!) Though the overlong text has been cut, it’s still a three-hour evening (and Barker repeats himself). But Gus Kaikkonen’s production on the Mint’s small stage is a welcome one and, for the most, part well acted. I would have preferred George Morfogen’s Constantine to be less serene, and possibly more flamboyantly wolfish. Thomas Hammond’s messianic, sexually aloof Philip is exactly right. I was so struck by the unknown actress in the supporting role of Emma, one of the Huxtable daughters, that I looked her up in the Playbill. Allison McLemore, a recent college grad, is making an enchanting New York debut, and surely has wonderful things ahead of her.

A WORD OR TWO IN FAVOR OF THE ART of silliness. It takes a genial kind of talent to be truly silly, and I won’t hear a word against Christopher Durang anyway. In an unusual program note, Mr. Durang writes of Adrift in Macao, his affectionate musical spoof of film noir at the 59East59 Street Theaters, that if Graham Greene could distinguish between his psychological novels and the minor mysteries he termed “entertainments,’’ Mr. Durang would like to make the same distinction in his own work. And why not? He explains that his more serious satires are written in frustration to point out the stupidities of life that upset him, whereas a parody springs from fondness for the subject. A “friendly-silly” piece like Adrift in Macao is written in a good mood.

Or, as his blond dame Lureena, fresh off the boat in a slinky satin dress, puts it: “I been around.” It’s true that film noir send-ups aren’t new. (Among two thousand of them, one thinks of Charles Busch’s Shanghai Moon or the Cy Coleman/Larry Gelbart City of Angels.) But only Mr. Durang would dare to invent a tough-talking nightclub owner named Rick Shaw. Or a “very scrutable” Chinese manservant who’s named Tempura because he’s been “battered by life.”

One enjoys groaning happily, and there’s much opportunity here. “I may be beautiful and even oversexed,” Lureena announces, “but business is business and never the twain shall meet.”

“Which twain?” Rick asks.

“The gwavy twain,” replies smoky Lureena.

The moral of Adrift in Macao might not be as gwave as that of The Madras House, but minor Christopher Durang is far, far better than no Durang at all. Directed by Sheryl Kaller, with a small, talented cast, the show has a very catchy score by Peter Melnick. At the end, we all get to sing along merrily to the sincerely awful “Ticky Ticky Tock,” led by Billy Holliday Wong.

It all began 42 years ago, in 1964, with a British TV program from Granada Television, a World in Action special directed by Paul Almond and researched by Mr. Apted. A diverse group of 7-year-olds from all over England were interviewed about their lives, hopes and dreams for the future. The series was inspired by the Jesuit maxim, “Give me the child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” Mr. Apted took over the series from there, and he has dutifully given us seven-year progress reports on the original subjects. His latest entry in the ledger of life, 49 Up, is being released in 2006, after a showing at this year’s New York Film Festival. Mr. Apted was 23 when the first of the programs, Seven Up, was shown; he is now, inexorably, 65.

In the interim, he has managed a prodigiously productive career in mainstream movies along with his continuing involvement in television documentaries, made-for-TV play adaptations and fiction films, and even TV commercials well into the age of cable and DVD. Among his more familiar credits are The Triple Echo (1972), Stardust (1974), Agatha (1979), Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Blink (1994), Nell (1994), The World Is Not Enough (1999), Enigma (2001) and Enough (2002). He has won every award there is, particularly with Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist. Like one of his subjects in the Up series, Mr. Apted has moved to America and apparently settled there.

If I seem unusually tentative about Mr. Apted, it is because I, too, have aged 42 years since I first saw Seven Up, which has taken me from 36 to 78, which I don’t like to think about. Curiously, I find that the passage of time and the huge impact of the Up series overall has made Mr. Apted’s standing as an auteur foggier in my mind than ever.

But I am not alone in my indecisiveness. The renowned film historian, David Thomson, normally amply endowed with judgmental certitude, has virtually thrown up his hands over Mr. Apted’s extraordinary productivity, versatility and ubiquity, especially in the following passage from his invaluable and monumental The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: “Apted is not just an Englishman who has made an unusual commitment to American regionalism. He was born eight days before I was, and only fifty miles away—so I try to keep up with him. But since his interests are so varied, and his personality so fleeting, this is no easy task. We have only to note that in 1998, he put together the latest installment in his survey of a group of English lives and the latest James Bond movie with equal fairness, never letting one part of his mind judge the other.”

Over the years, the very consciously contrived class divisions in the Up group have struck me in contrastingly different ways. At 7, all children are supposed to be endearingly cute, but the upper-class boys in Mr. Apted’s study came across as such complacent twits that the lower- and middle-class children seemed much more likeably “natural” and “spontaneous.” But as time went on, in 14 Up and 21 Up, the upper-class kids grew up to become more interesting—and certainly better spoken—than their poorer and less-educated contemporaries.

At the time, I recalled George Orwell’s observation that the lower-class British soldiers in World War I looked 10 years older than their upper-class comrades. But by the time Mr. Apted started his research, several Labor Party governments had improved the school diets of the poorer children. Hence, the physical differences between classes were not as pronounced as the cultural differences.

One has to wonder how much the Up series itself changed the lives of its participants. They mostly turned out fairly well: Most got married at one time or another and had children, though with a strange preponderance of sons over daughters. Most seemed to have moved great distances from where they began, one all the way to Australia and another to America. There were several divorces and remarriages. None of the childhood subjects turned out to be gay. None turned to any form of crime. One or two chose to drop out along the way, though one returned at 49 after having opted out of the two previous sessions.

Still, one cannot imagine media-savvy children of the present time, either in England or the United States, undertaking such an experiment without maneuvering to become big stars—or, better still, big “idols”—in the process. Then too, the criteria for selection would provoke endless debates over alleged ethnic, racial and religious discrimination. And the mere suggestion that we live in a society controlled by class divisions and distinctions would enrage many in both England and America.

In any event, one cannot imagine any filmmaker in England or America with the ability, temperament or sheer endurance to make what amounts to a lifelong commitment to tracking the lives of comparative strangers. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone anywhere these days with Mr. Apted’s almost miraculous ability to listen understandingly to angry and aggrieved speakers over the direction that their life’s story is taking.

One wonders also how many of us could bear to hear our words spoken at age 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 and 49 thrown back at us on the big screen to mock us before the world. Bruce was just 7 when he said he wanted to be a missionary so he could work in Africa and “teach people who are not civilized to be, more or less, good.”

After graduating from Oxford, Bruce did manage to teach in Bangladesh. Indeed, it is interesting how many of the Seven Up children would end up in one form of teaching or another, as if there was an unspoken agreement among them to give something back to the community—in many instances, the East End of London.

The least successful and most pathetic of the Seven Up children was clearly Neil, who seemed happy enough at 7 and 14, but was shown wandering lonely and homeless at 28. One feared the worst for him, but at 42 he was rediscovered—seemingly still penniless—working as a Liberal Democrat councilman in Hackney. He never seems to have married, and we never learn how he managed to survive through all the lean years. For that matter, Mr. Apted has never penetrated the deepest and most fearsome secret of modern times: how much money we make, and how many tokens of material success do we have? We see the external signs of wealth and achievement—houses, furniture, clothes, leisure-time activities, vacations, etc.—but no hard figures on assets and liabilities, income and debts, or inheritances either actual and potential.

In Seven Up, Lynn said she wanted to work in Woolworth’s, but she actually began working in a library at 12, and at 42 Up she was still there after 30 years. In 49 Up, Lynn reports the heartbreaking news that her post as a children’s librarian is soon to be abolished. So even when people devote their lives to helping—in Lynn’s case, with severely handicapped children—the powers-that-be can decree otherwise. On the other hand, even the children who sounded like upper-class twits at 7 revealed powerful charitable impulses as they became older.

One of the most amusingly revelatory episodes involves one of the less-privileged children, who fails to achieve his career goal of becoming a jockey and becomes a cabdriver instead. Along with his cabdriver wife, he manages to make enough money to afford a second home on the Spanish coast, in a community where there is a greater concentration of his fellow Englishmen than can currently be found in his old London East End neighborhood—which like everywhere else, keeps changing amid all the global turmoil.

All in all, 49 Up is a must-see entertainment as well as a wondrous history of the turbulent times we have lived through over the past 42 years. Yet what admittedly began for Mr. Apted as a savage critique of the English class system has gradually evolved into a breath-taking existential epic, which reminds us poetically that we make the journey through life only once, and every moment and memory of it is infinitely precious. I do not know Mr. Apted, but when I hear the sound of his voice gently asking one of his most aggrieved subjects what she wants him to ask her about her life, I recognize in his voice the sound of an artist whose strongest bond with his subject is one of love.

Maggiebaby

Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby, from her own screenplay, has gone the full Sundance route from workshop to the recruiting of a “name” lead, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and from there to catchpenny financing, unobtrusive location shooting in New Jersey, and a limited release to the usual art-film theaters in the usual big cities. What has emerged is a very serviceable and plausible vehicle for one of the most charismatic actresses in the industry—if one can describe independent filmmaking as an industry these days rather than a desperate crapshoot teetering on the edge between very limited success and utter oblivion.

Ms. Collyer described the inspiration for her film thusly: “One of my closest childhood friends went to prison the year I graduated from college. I based the story of Sherrybaby on her life. We used to party together in junior high and high school, and I always looked up to her as someone who didn’t take shit from anybody. I think I became obsessed with her story because in the back of my mind I knew that it could have been me going down that path. Two other kids from my block died in their mid-30’s from heroin; between them was also one little girl left behind.”

Ms. Collyer has dedicated Sherrybaby to “Sue,” her prison-bound, heroin-addicted friend from high school. And Ms. Gyllenhaal has researched the role down to the bleach-and-dye jobs that her character, Sherry Swanson, gets in a vain attempt to adapt successfully to life on parole and regain the love of her little girl, Alexis (Ryan Simpkins), who is now in the loving care of Sherry’s brother Bobby (Brad William Henke) and his possessive wife, Lynette, who has no children of her own and thus has fastened on Alexis as her surrogate child. Sherry has other problems as well, including with her suspicious parole officer Hernandez (Giancarlo Esposito), as well as the sheer impossibility of finding a well-paying job with her prison record. Sherry’s very limited final triumph is her realization that she cannot satisfy her emotional goals all at once, but must take them one step at a time. Even her permanent reunion with Alexis must be deferred until she can provide for her both emotionally and financially.

Ms. Gyllenhaal projects an uninhibited sensuality, yet not without a restraining core of pragmatic intelligence. The light that comes into her eyes as she decides at long last not to be an accomplice in her own destruction is alone worth the price of admission. As an actress, Ms. Gyllenhaal seems to steer clear of any parts that seek to exploit an audience’s weakness for conventionally happy endings. Her films are therefore always worth seeing.

It all began 42 years ago, in 1964, with a British TV program from Granada Television, a World in Action special directed by Paul Almond and researched by Mr. Apted. A diverse group of 7-year-olds from all over England were interviewed about their lives, hopes and dreams for the future. The series was inspired by the Jesuit maxim, “Give me the child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” Mr. Apted took over the series from there, and he has dutifully given us seven-year progress reports on the original subjects. His latest entry in the ledger of life, 49 Up, is being released in 2006, after a showing at this year’s New York Film Festival. Mr. Apted was 23 when the first of the programs, Seven Up, was shown; he is now, inexorably, 65.

In the interim, he has managed a prodigiously productive career in mainstream movies along with his continuing involvement in television documentaries, made-for-TV play adaptations and fiction films, and even TV commercials well into the age of cable and DVD. Among his more familiar credits are The Triple Echo (1972), Stardust (1974), Agatha (1979), Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Blink (1994), Nell (1994), The World Is Not Enough (1999), Enigma (2001) and Enough (2002). He has won every award there is, particularly with Coal Miner’s Daughter an d Gorillas in the Mist. Like one of his subjects in the Up series, Mr. Apted has moved to America and apparently settled there.

If I seem unusually tentative about Mr. Apted, it is because I, too, have aged 42 years since I first saw Seven Up, which has taken me from 36 to 78, which I don’t like to think about. Curiously, I find that the passage of time and the huge impact of the Up series overall has made Mr. Apted’s standing as an auteur foggier in my mind than ever.

But I am not alone in my indecisiveness. The renowned film historian, David Thomson, normally amply endowed with judgmental certitude, has virtually thrown up his hands over Mr. Apted’s extraordinary productivity, versatility and ubiquity, especially in the following passage from his invaluable and monumental The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: “Apted is not just an Englishman who has made an unusual commitment to American regionalism. He was born eight days before I was, and only fifty miles away—so I try to keep up with him. But since his interests are so varied, and his personality so fleeting, this is no easy task. We have only to note that in 1998, he put together the latest installment in his survey of a group of English lives and the latest James Bond movie with equal fairness, never letting one part of his mind judge the other.”

Over the years, the very consciously contrived class divisions in the Up group have struck me in contrastingly different ways. At 7, all children are supposed to be endearingly cute, but the upper-class boys in Mr. Apted’s study came across as such complacent twits that the lower- and middle-class children seemed much more likeably “natural” and “spontaneous.” But as time went on, in 14 Up and 21 Up, the upper-class kids grew up to become more interesting—and certainly better spoken—than their poorer and less-educated contemporaries.

At the time, I recalled George Orwell’s observation that the lower-class British soldiers in World War I looked 10 years older than their upper-class comrades. But by the time Mr. Apted started his research, several Labor Party governments had improved the school diets of the poorer children. Hence, the physical differences between classes were not as pronounced as the cultural differences.

One has to wonder how much the Up series itself changed the lives of its participants. They mostly turned out fairly well: Most got married at one time or another and had children, though with a strange preponderance of sons over daughters. Most seemed to have moved great distances from where they began, one all the way to Australia and another to America. There were several divorces and remarriages. None of the childhood subjects turned out to be gay. None turned to any form of crime. One or two chose to drop out along the way, though one returned at 49 after having opted out of the two previous sessions.

Still, one cannot imagine media-savvy children of the present time, either in England or the United States, undertaking such an experiment without maneuvering to become big stars—or, better still, big “idols”—in the process. Then too, the criteria for selection would provoke endless debates over alleged ethnic, racial and religious discrimination. And the mere suggestion that we live in a society controlled by class divisions and distinctions would enrage many in both England and America.

In any event, one cannot imagine any filmmaker in England or America with the ability, temperament or sheer endurance to make what amounts to a lifelong commitment to tracking the lives of comparative strangers. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone anywhere these days with Mr. Apted’s almost miraculous ability to listen understandingly to angry and aggrieved speakers over the direction that their life’s story is taking.

One wonders also how many of us could bear to hear our words spoken at age 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 and 49 thrown back at us on the big screen to mock us before the world. Bruce was just 7 when he said he wanted to be a missionary so he could work in Africa and “teach people who are not civilized to be, more or less, good.”

After graduating from Oxford, Bruce did manage to teach in Bangladesh. Indeed, it is interesting how many of the Seven Up children would end up in one form of teaching or another, as if there was an unspoken agreement among them to give something back to the community—in many instances, the East End of London.

The least successful and most pathetic of the Seven Up children was clearly Neil, who seemed happy enough at 7 and 14, but was shown wandering lonely and homeless at 28. One feared the worst for him, but at 42 he was rediscovered—seemingly still penniless—working as a Liberal Democrat councilman in Hackney. He never seems to have married, and we never learn how he managed to survive through all the lean years. For that matter, Mr. Apted has never penetrated the deepest and most fearsome secret of modern times: how much money we make, and how many tokens of material success do we have? We see the external signs of wealth and achievement—houses, furniture, clothes, leisure-time activities, vacations, etc.—but no hard figures on assets and liabilities, income and debts, or inheritances either actual and potential.

In Seven Up, Lynn said she wanted to work in Woolworth’s, but she actually began working in a library at 12, and at 42 Up she was still there after 30 years. In 49 Up, Lynn reports the heartbreaking news that her post as a children’s librarian is soon to be abolished. So even when people devote their lives to helping—in Lynn’s case, with severely handicapped children—the powers-that-be can decree otherwise. On the other hand, even the children who sounded like upper-class twits at 7 revealed powerful charitable impulses as they became older.

One of the most amusingly revelatory episodes involves one of the less-privileged children, who fails to achieve his career goal of becoming a jockey and becomes a cabdriver instead. Along with his cabdriver wife, he manages to make enough money to afford a second home on the Spanish coast, in a community where there is a greater concentration of his fellow Englishmen than can currently be found in his old London East End neighborhood—which like everywhere else, keeps changing amid all the global turmoil.

All in all, 49 Up is a must-see entertainment as well as a wondrous history of the turbulent times we have lived through over the past 42 years. Yet what admittedly began for Mr. Apted as a savage critique of the English class system has gradually evolved into a breath-taking existential epic, which reminds us poetically that we make the journey through life only once, and every moment and memory of it is infinitely precious. I do not know Mr. Apted, but when I hear the sound of his voice gently asking one of his most aggrieved subjects what she wants him to ask her about her life, I recognize in his voice the sound of an artist whose strongest bond with his subject is one of love.

Maggiebaby

Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby, from her own screenplay, has gone the full Sundance route from workshop to the recruiting of a “name” lead, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and from there to catchpenny financing, unobtrusive location shooting in New Jersey, and a limited release to the usual art-film theaters in the usual big cities. What has emerged is a very serviceable and plausible vehicle for one of the most charismatic actresses in the industry—if one can describe independent filmmaking as an industry these days rather than a desperate crapshoot teetering on the edge between very limited success and utter oblivion.

Ms. Collyer described the inspiration for her film thusly: “One of my closest childhood friends went to prison the year I graduated from college. I based the story of Sherrybaby on her life. We used to party together in junior high and high school, and I always looked up to her as someone who didn’t take shit from anybody. I think I became obsessed with her story because in the back of my mind I knew that it could have been me going down that path. Two other kids from my block died in their mid-30’s from heroin; between them was also one little girl left behind.”

Ms. Collyer has dedicated Sherrybaby to “Sue,” her prison-bound, heroin-addicted friend from high school. And Ms. Gyllenhaal has researched the role down to the bleach-and-dye jobs that her character, Sherry Swanson, gets in a vain attempt to adapt successfully to life on parole and regain the love of her little girl, Alexis (Ryan Simpkins), who is now in the loving care of Sherry’s brother Bobby (Brad William Henke) and his possessive wife, Lynette, who has no children of her own and thus has fastened on Alexis as her surrogate child. Sherry has other problems as well, including with her suspicious parole officer Hernandez (Giancarlo Esposito), as well as the sheer impossibility of finding a well-paying job with her prison record. Sherry’s very limited final triumph is her realization that she cannot satisfy her emotional goals all at once, but must take them one step at a time. Even her permanent reunion with Alexis must be deferred until she can provide for her both emotionally and financially.

Ms. Gyllenhaal projects an uninhibited sensuality, yet not without a restraining core of pragmatic intelligence. The light that comes into her eyes as she decides at long last not to be an accomplice in her own destruction is alone worth the price of admission. As an actress, Ms. Gyllenhaal seems to steer clear of any parts that seek to exploit an audience’s weakness for conventionally happy endings. Her films are therefore always worth seeing.

Pipes concludes, "Britain's potential terrorists live in a highly nurturing community."

His point is well taken. Terrorism is a hearts-and-minds issue. Terrorists draw strength, both in finances and in morale, from law-abiding communities. One reason I am for Islamic reformers.

Pipes's point also opens the door on my question: How important is Israel, politically/religiously, in the hearts and minds of the neoconservatives and other Jewish hawks? I think, very large. For instance, former Bush speechwriter David Frum describes America as "this new Israel," while Elliott Abrams, Bush's aide on Middle East matters, writes:

The neocons, along with a lot of Democratic hawks, have thoroughly conflated American and Israeli interests, to the detriment of U.S. foreign policy. They honestly believe our interests and Israel's are congruent. I think they're wrong, and Americans should debate this. And if it's legitimate to talk about how Muslims identify themselves, and I think it is, it is also fair to ask how important Israel is to rightwing Jewish-Americans who have pushed for war with Iraq, Syria and Iran.

But with her second novel, Ms. Ali—like Mr. Ishiguro—is going all refusenik on the idea that writers of a certain background should take their origins as their exclusive subject matter. Instead, she’s chosen a very old-school form of British storytelling—the expat novel—with not a sari in sight. Noticeably on parade in the rural Portugal where she sets Alentejo Blue are the shades of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Paul Scott and Muriel Spark, all of whom plopped down their characters in exotic climes, which merely highlighted how very English they—and their habits, prejudices and foibles—were.

Contemporary English affluence has a very particular relationship with Portugal. From its declining villages, dying farms and unraveling towns—sadly beautiful all, in Ms. Ali’s telling—come many of the richer country’s domestic cleaners and baby-sitters, housekeepers and nannies, restaurant workers and day laborers. Ratty old England, as Ms. Ali knows to intimate, is their promised land. So just as the novel’s various tourists and exiles, petty criminals and blocked writers, engaged and disengaging couples migrate to the Alentejo (“The poorest region in the poorest country in the European Union,” as one of Ms. Ali’s jaded expatriates puts it), there are locals who dream of escape, crossing rocky paths with the visitors in an exchange of hopes and disillusion.

Pretty, ambitious Teresa is one with a flight plan, worriedly hiding the airmail letter offering her a job as a London nanny in the pocket of the sexy outfit she wears to dazzle the boyfriend she’s going to leave behind. He won’t be able to take it well: They’re surrounded as it is by women who have donned “widow’s black” because their husbands went abroad.

But Teresa is already halfway gone—functioning at a remove, she considers her “powers of observation … somehow keener than those of other people.”

She’s astute—understanding, for instance, that Senhor Vasco the restaurant owner, who once had his own adventure in America, is “building a wall of fat to conceal his deep, deep sadness,” or that her elegant mother will always favor her feckless brother over her. Yet many things also escape her, including the true complexion of the half-century-old friendship between two battered codgers.

That friendship draws to a brutal, despairing close with the episode that opens the book. It’s told in faux-Hemingway prose that Ms. Ali luckily soon jettisons, along with this Portuguese Brokeback Mountain scenario, which seems only to serve the purpose of slipping in the country’s history of fascism, dictatorship, failed collectivization and continuing domination by an invisible, omnipotent upper class. Another overly predictable detail is a native-son-made-good whose eagerly awaited return as economic savior makes not a wit of difference, except to get people thinking about the resort-hotel monstrosities for which they’d be more than willing to barter their ancestral lands.

The good earth is going bad. The old-timers in the cork-producing region are appalled by the advent of plastic stoppers, and gruesome incidents threaten the farm animals. The sense that some evil force has been tampering with nature seems unavoidable in a place where “most of the peach trees … were sick,” their fruit rotten at the core. The weather, for that matter, goes from blistering, cruel heat wave to dark, depressing, torrential downpours with barely a respite. (Not every prospect is grim: “ocher fields rose and fell gently as a lullaby,” and “the hills … seal away the world”—but the pretty pictures are rare and getting rarer.)

The most famous tourist site in the area is a medieval chapel built from the skulls of monks. At least one romance threatens to crash and burn there when a vacationing English banker and his bride-to-be confront their spiritual demons and each other in the middle of the spooky bones. Ms. Ali isn’t allowing anyone a vacation paradise. For several characters, this is more like the end of the road.

Attempting to weather the Alentejo’s extremes of mood and environment, the tawdry Potts family has stuck it out the longest of the foreigners. Squatters in a huddle of derelict caravans, the alcoholic father and self-destructive mother launch their deaf teenage daughter and lonely wisp of son on misadventures that can only end badly. Several of these involve—and sordidly implicate—a writer named Stanton, who’s holed up in this glamour-forsaken backwater so he can finish a novel about William Blake. But he’s easily distracted, unfortunately for the compatriots he encounters at his ringside seat in the local café. Stanton doesn’t know whether to be more scornful of types like the proper middle-aged couple negotiating their attitudes toward their gay son or of his own mounting failures as a writer, mentor and human being.

In his novel, Stanton is struggling to capture a Blake who’s not just an industrial-age visionary but also a passionate artist embarked on what Stanton calls “the country interlude.” Monica Ali has set herself a similar task by airlifting her gifts as a writer to a wildly distinctive and remote countryside. Her descriptive grasp of the landscape and the lives it breeds, as well as her feel for the village-square mentality in towns on the brink of change, take nothing for granted. Not so her deracinated Brits, who drive from place to place at too many kilometers per hour: They speed past her as she quick-sketches them, and they don’t entirely take shape. It’s not a question of subject matter; it’s a question of pace. Let’s hope Ms. Ali will slow down on the road ahead.

Celia McGee is a book critic and arts writer in New York.