Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood, renowned film critic David Thomson vividly shows how, in 1959, Hitchcock masterfully made Psycho to reflect the sexual, creative, and political ferment that would soon overtake the nation. Psycho, all of a sudden, represented all America wanted from a film?and, as The Moment of Psycho brilliantly demonstrates, it still does.

Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime—these are a few of nearly 100 names that inhabit the mind of the narrator as he starts to compose short biographies of some of the most famous characters in the history of film noir. He sketches in whole lives, lives as intense as the dreams put up on the screen. The book begins to become a novel when the characters start to meet each other outside their respective films—as if they were real people with needs and passions. The names and faces are familiar to us—Jake Gittes from Chinatown, Laura Hunt and Waldo Lydecker from Laura, Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca—but is it true that Noah Cross and Norma Desmond were lovers in the 1920s, that she and Joe Gillis had a son who grew up to be Julian Kay in American Gigolo? The narrator is not merely the author, he has a mission to carry out—a lost family link to find, a thread to pull so that nearly all these disparate characters come together to form a kind of society. Ultimately this examination on how movies affect audiences—not only shaping perceptions and memories, but in some ways coming to stand in for them—can also be read as an unsettling examination of identity and the construction of self through the medium of narratives; or simply as a fascinating take on movie fandom.

Ten years in the making, this beautifully presented book is both a collector's delight and is also a must as a practical guide for anyone contemplating playing the links course of Great Britain and Ireland. No one has ever before produced such a detailed analysis of so many courses and with magnificent photographs to help golfers enjoy the journey. Descriptions for 155 courses round out this guide.