Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once his country’s richest man, has resided in “gulag lite,” as he calls the Russian penal system under Vladimir Putin, for six years. Since the spring, on most working days he is roused at 6:45 in the morning, surrounded by guards and packed into an armored van for the drive to court. For two hours each way, the man who once supplied 2 percent of the world’s oil crouches in a steel cage measuring 47 by 31 by 20 inches. Convicted of tax evasion and fraud in 2005, Khodorkovsky now faces a fresh set of charges that add up to the supposed theft of $30 billion. In the dark of the van, Khodorkovsky tries to prepare for his trial, replaying in his mind his night reading, the daily stack of documents from his lawyers. But Russia’s most famous prisoner worries too about what would happen if a car slammed into the van. (Collisions are routine in Moscow’s clotted avenues.) “Your chances of making it out alive,” he wrote me one day this summer, “at any speed, are next to none.”

Khodorkovsky (pronounced ko-door-KOFF-skee) has spent more than 2,200 days behind bars. He cannot receive reporters. Yet the ban has brought a revival of a dissident tradition dating back to Ivan Grozny and Prince Andrey Kurbsky in the 16th century: the epistolary exchange. For several months this year, from July until October, Khodorkovsky and I were able to conduct a series of exchanges — as he has done with other correspondents, both foreign and native — filtered through the hands of lawyers (who transcribe his oral replies) and avoiding the eyes of prison officials. In court, he has maintained that he fails to understand the case against him. The new indictment runs 3,487 pages but boils down to a single accusation: that the former C.E.O. of the Yukos oil firm and his deputy, Platon Lebedev, were part of an “organized criminal group” that stole 350 million tons of oil from their company between 1998 to 2003. The tonnage exceeds Yukos’s production during the period in question. If convicted, Khodorkovsky, whose first sentence ends in 2011, could face an additional 22 years in jail.

In the decade since Putin’s rise, Russians have grown inured to celebrity criminal cases. The murders of politicians, journalists and human rights activists; apartment-house blocks bombed to ruins; the carnage of the hostage sieges in Moscow and Beslan — the acts of horror and terror have numbed the populace. The exception is the delo Khodorkovskogo — the Khodorkovsky case. No other affair has lingered as long in the minds of so many. The case marked a turning point for Russia, the divide between the turbulent Yeltsin years and the stricter rule of the Putin era. And today, in its second iteration unfolding in Moscow, much more than the fate of an oligarch hangs in the balance.

From the start of his presidency on New Year’s Day 2000, Putin was on a roll. But it was the takedown of Khodorkovsky in 2003 that upped the ante. Under Yeltsin, the chieftains of Russia’s vast financial-investment groups held sway over the vital industries (oil, metals, banking and media) and, to a large degree, held the government hostage. That changed on a frigid October night, when masked agents of the Federal Security Service boarded a plane on a Siberian tarmac and enacted one of the most famous perp walks in Russian history, an oligarch returned to the capital at gunpoint.

Khodorkovsky’s arrest stunned Russian nationalists and Western hedge-fund managers alike. Putin had forced the oligarchs to toe a new party line: profits could be blessed, but only if politics stayed off-limits. “The Yukos case marked the start, in 2003, of gosudarstvennoe reiderstvo” — “state raiding” — Khodorkovsky told me in a Russian-language reply last month. For edification, he explained ‘‘reiderstvo,” a word borrowed from Wall Street that has entered the language of Pushkin: “That is, the seizure of others’ property with the aid of state institutions (first and foremost, the organs of law enforcement).” The attacks, he argued from jail, spelled “a disaster for Russian business.” Under Putin, the state blithely acquired a string of Russia’s fattest companies — first and foremost, Khodorkovsky’s own. Despite assurances that the Kremlin would never nationalize Yukos, the state oil company Rosneft, led by Igor Sechin, a Putin confidant and former intelligence officer, soon took over Yukos’s most prodigious fields and refineries.

For Putin, the reclamation project proved a boon. Russia’s titans locked arms in a docile chorus and rushed to finance Kremlin projects. For years, as long as the price of Urals crude soared, Putin could forget about an unruly oligarch in a Siberian prison. He could even decamp from the Kremlin, usher in a handpicked successor (Dmitri Medvedev), move to the prime minister’s office and remain the power behind the throne. But the second Khodorkovsky trial has come at an inopportune time. For a decade, Putinism rested on an unsound social contract, a sacrifice of liberties for stability. Now, however, the global downturn has hit. Russia’s economy is projected to contract by 8 percent in 2009, and the number of Russians below the poverty line has grown to 17 percent. At the same time, the Putin-Medvedev diarchy — diarkhiya, pundits term it — is showing its seams, and the campaign against Khodorkovsky, a cornerstone of Putin’s rule, threatens to open fissures. In Moscow, the circle of those who question the hard line has widened beyond marginalized liberals — to oligarchs, politicians, even journalists, who once marched in lock step with the Kremlin. Their voices are unlikely to spur a groundswell of support for Khodorkovsky, much less an organized political opposition. But they do pose a discomfiting question, one that has hung over the Kremlin since the legal campaign began: Who fears a free Khodorkovsky?

THE ANSWER MAY lie in the history. At 46, Mikhail Khodorkovsky has lived several lives. As a boy, he never wanted to be a cosmonaut or a general or a soccer star. He dreamed of becoming a factory boss. That his dream came true, in such stunning fashion, leads you to wonder whether his meteoric rise was a matter of genius, luck, ruthlessness or connections. To be sure, timing, intelligence and muscle all played a part. But the son of engineers had no running start.

Boris Khodorkovsky and his wife, Marina, gave decades to Moscow’s Kalibr plant, maker of high-precision instruments. Yet by 23, their son was an ascendant graduate of one of the U.S.S.R.’s most prestigious chemistry institutes, a state loyalist who had served as the deputy chairman of the institute’s Komsomol, the Communist Youth League. As he sought to take advantage of the improbable opportunities that arose under Mikhail Gorbachev, Khodorkovsky’s Komsomol tenure, a rarity for a Jew in Moscow, would open state doors. By 26, even before the fall of the Soviet Union, he had made his first fortune — importing PCs and selling them at a sixfold profit. Soon he had founded a bank, Menatep, one of the first private brands in Soviet finance.

In 1991, as he reminded me, Khodorkovsky left his wife at home with a rifle and stood inside the besieged White House, seat of the Russian government, as Yeltsin climbed atop a tank and sped the Soviet collapse. In 1995, at 32, Khodorkovsky, leading the savviest team in Moscow, had amassed enough money and contacts to take over Yukos, a state-owned petroleum behemoth, for a $309 million down payment. The following year, he helped stave off the Communists’ revanche and re-elect Yeltsin. By 40, Khodorkovsky reigned among the oligarchs, with a portfolio that had spread from banking to agriculture to oil. As Russia entered the new century, and Yukos rose as its most prodigious oil company, its C.E.O. became a multibillionaire.

Moscow would soon grow famous for operatic oligarchs and Byzantine intrigues, but Khodorkovsky never got caught in a compromising position — never snared at an Alpine resort, a Moscow casino or on a Riviera yacht. Girls, power, even the money, seemed to hold no magic. Where others basked in pomp, he was shy and painfully soft-spoken; you never heard his squeaky voice, a semitone deeper than Mike Tyson’s, at dacha parties for the foreign press, let alone on television. He divorced young but stayed on good terms with his first wife. Inna, his second, he met at the institute. Khodorkovsky was never flashy — he wore jeans and turtlenecks; the family vacationed in Finland — but he radiated the unlikely allure of a muscular technocrat. And yet, even at the top, he seemed adrift, unsure of his role in society. Unlike older Jewish oligarchs, men like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, who were often animated by old scores to settle, Khodorkovsky did not seem to consider himself an outsider. Lacking a public persona, he came to personify, by default, the revenge of the Soviet geek.

By 2000, Putin had entered the Kremlin. But Khodorkovsky — his net worth reportedly $2,5 billion — tried on a new role. He’d changed, he told colleagues. If in the past, Yukos and Menatep had exploited tax havens, stringing a daisy chain of shell companies across the offshore zones of Europe, Khodorkovsky now became an advocate for corporate governance. The first signs of an evolution had come under Yeltsin. In 1998, Russia suffered a crash — the state devalued the ruble, defaulted on $40 billion in bonds and cut its umbilical cord to the capital markets. Banks collapsed, the stock market tanked and the oligarchs turned desperate. Khodorkovsky, or so he told colleagues at the time, saw the need to reform. Companies that believed in transparency and shareholders’ rights, he now preached, did not fear lean times; they attracted foreign investment, and they grew. Skeptics abounded. It was, at the least, a timely conversion.

Even as Putin sought to curb the oligarchs, Khodorkovsky expanded his influence by new means. He brought in American firms like McKinsey and Schlumberger, experts in making the most of oil and profits. He also sought an insurance policy. Nearly a decade ago, he hired APCO, the Washington lobbying firm that employs former ambassadors and Congressmen. But in Putin’s second year in power, Khodorkovsky opened another front, setting up a foundation to support nonprofits and human rights groups. In the months before his arrest, he courted the administration of George W. Bush and power brokers like James Baker. His foundation recruited Henry Kissinger and Lord Rothschild for its board. He financed policy groups in D.C. and human rights activists at home, and to the joy of Laura Bush, he gave a million dollars to the Library of Congress. He joined the Carlyle Group’s Energy Advisory board, serving alongside Baker, and met — on separate occasions — with the elder Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney.

In Houston, Khodorkovsky dangled a 40 percent chunk of Yukos before the oilmen — the sale would have fetched billions and, possibly, ensured protection from the state. But in 2003, in a brazen affront, Khodorkovsky started to finance opposition political parties. Then that fall, he completed a megamerger, the union of Yukos and Sibneft, another Russian major, to create the world’s fourth-largest oil company. His rise was nearly complete. But all the while, as he told me in one exchange, he’d seen the warning signs. “I knew they’d arrest me,” he wrote. “I even spoke about it.”

In October 2003, Khodorkovsky boarded a jet in Moscow a near-wanted man. After a summer of saying goodbyes to friends and family abroad, he embarked on a farewell tour. It would be a second act in his new role, an audition in the hinterland. He went on the stump, lecturing on a newfound vocation: “Democracy.” To his surprise, the gamble proved a success — eight regions, dozens of appearances, mostly young people at every stop. He was even given the stage at a military college. Next up was a human rights forum in a Siberian city nearby. But before his plane could take off, the dark vans had formed a circle on the tarmac.

“WHO FEARS A FREE Khodorkovsky?” asked Marina Filippovna Khodorkovskaya, the defendant’s 75-year-old mother. “Forgive me if I’m blunt, but it’s Putin, and all those around him who stole Yukos.” Marina Filippovna comes to court as often as possible. A sturdy former engineer, she has never shied from speaking her mind. Asked by the BBC what she would do if she met Putin, Marina Filippovna replied without pause, “I would kill him.” “It’s not for me to say what led to all this,” she told me, as we stood together one morning, awaiting the arrival of her son, in the dilapidated Khamovnichesky District Court in central Moscow. She raised both hands to conjure the years of turmoil. “I only know this case is about politics and money. But which is more important, only those on high” — again she gestured, this time to the ceiling — “know the truth.”

The answer is unlikely to emerge in Judge Viktor Danilkin’s courtroom, a humble affair on the third floor of a squat building perched above the Moscow River. Each time I went to court, over the course of two weeks earlier this year, I sat a few feet from the defendant. It was a scene to boggle Kafka’s imagination.

Khodorkovsky would spend hours, pink highlighter in one hand, yellow Post-its in another, meticulously winnowing down a stack of papers balanced on his crossed legs. He sat on a bench, locked inside a narrow rectangle of steel and bulletproof glass, along with his former deputy Lebedev. “The aquarium,” the guards have nicknamed the new model of the Soviet-era defendants’ cage. The wall of glass alone, Khodorkovsky later said in a missive, weighs a ton and a half. Court officials asked the defense team, a roster as long and distinguished as any in the annals of Russian jurisprudence, to move their desks away from the cage. “They feared the floorboards would buckle,” Khodorkovsky explained.

The trial is open, but only three or four reporters (all local) show up regularly. One morning, Marina and her husband, Boris, sat in the front row. On another day, Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster turned opposition leader, anchored a row in back, his bodyguard nearby. Outside the courthouse, a car blasted Russian techno, and atop the steep riverbank nearby, lovers mingled on benches and a stray drunk slumbered. The audience, rarely more than two dozen, was dominated by a female crew of Khodorkovsky supporters — the most devoted was a schoolteacher on a daily vigil. One day the supporters passed out yellow and green scarves, the Yukos colors. Nearly everyone, including the journalists, tied them around their necks.

The trial, now in its ninth month, has been distinguished by a Stakhanovite act of labor: the reading, without pause for water or bathroom breaks, of the evidence — 188 volumes of documents collected from the defense or in wiretaps and raids on Yukos, Menatep and affiliated offices. Like the prosecutors’ uniforms and the absence of a stenographer, the recitation is a Soviet holdover. The defense team, five lawyers that day, half-hidden behind an array of vases filled with roses, have the documents scanned, summonable on laptops. Valery Lakhtin, the reedy prosecutor, not only has trouble carrying the volumes (each several fingers thick); at times he seems in danger of drowning in all the oil and high finance. When he stumbles, confusing tons and barrels, dollars and rubles, the judge gently intervenes.

The courtroom contains two worlds. Behind the glass, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev grimace, giggle and kibitz. The two men, ghostly pale from years in prison, are the most animated people in the room. The lawyers, prosecutors and audience regulars sit still, silent actors for the most part in a burlesque. Nearly everyone tunes out the prosecutor’s droning. The guards fend off sleep, a courtroom artist sketches the roses and most heads turn to reading material.

I sat beside a security officer in plain clothes, a higher-up. For hours, he studied his cellphone, clicking through a novel. The reporters double-tasked between laptops — in a first, courtroom blogging is allowed — and books. One read Chuck Palahniuk. Two girls in their 20s read the Gospels. A man in back listened to an iPod. A teenager nearby did Sudoku. “It all seems pleasant,” Khodorkovsky’s chief Russian lawyer in the West, Karinna Moskalenko, had warned. Moskalenko, Russia’s most prominent human rights lawyer, has been on the legal team since shortly after the arrest. “The judge is polite; the clerk is attentive. My client can speak his mind, and we are treated kindly. But that’s all it is — a show, a farce.”

“Ours,” as his lawyers call Khodorkovsky, does not waste his days in court. He sifts through the papers and at times slowly stands, taps a microphone in the aquarium and pulls the brake on the prosecutor. He does not speak often, but when he does, it is with puckish brevity. Even after so long behind bars, Khodorkovsky remains the chief executive, amused by his surroundings, tolerant of the inconvenience and utterly undeterred.

Prison has changed him, to be sure. His hair is buzzed to a gray stubble, and his eyes are lined with red, but the rimless glasses, more befitting a Scandinavian scientist, remain. He is a man, even after years of a prison diet, of considerable bulk, but the unlikely softness of his features stands out, the tapered fingers and thin lips that can form a sudden, inscrutable smile. His confinement, it occurs to me as I watch him day after day, amounts to a third act in a singular evolution. Some may have doubted the authenticity of Khodorkovsky’s conversion to corporate governance or Jeffersonian democracy. But in court, it is not hard to see how his supporters believe that in prison he has gained what he lacked as an oligarch: an aura of moral fortitude.

Khodorkovsky insists his compatriots are watching. “The Yukos case,” he writes, “is known to every Russian entrepreneur, every judge and prosecutor, as well as the majority of the state’s officials and policemen.” He adds: “Thanks to its widespread publicity, the case will set the standard for investigation, court proceedings and respect for human rights on the part of the bureaucracy. It demonstrates what the state can and can’t do in order to meet its goals.”

The treatment, even by Russian standards, has been harsh. Khodorkovsky has spent 39 days in solitary, and 26 on hunger strikes. His health deteriorated. Moskalenko sought the advice of a London toxicologist — delivering his fingernail clippings from the camp in Siberia where he was being held — fearful her client had been poisoned. He did have his nose slashed — by a cellmate who claimed self-defense in a homosexual approach. (Khodorkovsky’s lawyers had long feared a jailhouse attack, but dismissed the incident. “Pathetic provocation,” one termed it.) Khodorkovsky has earned time in solitary for an array of offenses: accepting two lemons from his wife, sipping tea in an improper site, leaving his workstation (his camp job was to sew shirts and gloves), possessing state decrees on prison regulations and failing to walk with his hands behind his back outside his cell. He has spent more than two years in fetid Moscow remand jails. He now shares a cell with between 3 and 8 prisoners; for nearly two years after his arrest, he shared, with as many as 15 others, a cell equipped with iron bunks, a single table and a 33-inch partition to shield a common toilet.

From the beginning, however, an issue has hampered the defense: Khodorkovsky is no classic dissident like Sakharov. As Khodorkovsky built Yukos, the oligarchic standards of the 1990s were maintained: the state bureaucracy and offshore zones were exploited. And in the tumult, as Putin noted recently, there was blood. In 1998, on Khodorkovsky’s birthday, Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Nefteyugansk, a Siberian town fed on Yukos oil, who had complained about Yukos’s failure to pay its debts to the town and its workers, was shot dead. Then there was the 2002 disappearance of Sergei Gorin, onetime manager of the Tambov branch of Menatep, and his wife, Olga. To date, their bodies have not been found, but a Moscow court has convicted one of Khodorkovsky’s closest former partners, Leonid Nevzlin, now living in Israel, of ordering their murder. Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin and their lawyers deny any involvement in the crimes.

Khodorkovsky’s arrest divided the human rights community. Many can’t quite embrace an oligarch as a prisoner of conscience. He is a titan who fell from favor, some say, not a dissident physicist or a novelist arrested for a subversive manuscript. Whatever his sins, though, Khodorkovsky was not jailed for breaking the law. His courting of the Bush White House and pursuit of oil partners at home and abroad infuriated the Kremlin. But his gravest error was to challenge Putin. The reason behind his imprisonment, Khodorkovsky claims, “is well known and widely discussed. It was my constant support of opposition parties and the Kremlin’s desire to deprive them of an independent source of financing. As for the more base reason, it was the desire to seize someone else’s efficient company.”

His motives may have been mercenary, but Khodorkovsky in his cell has come to embody the fiat of the state, its arbitrary and boundless power. To date, the authorities have brought charges against 43 former Yukos employees and associates, conducted more than 100 raids (including one on the orphanage run by Khodorkovsky’s parents) and jailed a string of defense lawyers. Two suffered particularly ugly ordeals. Vasily Aleksanyan, a 38-year-old Russian with a Harvard law degree, remained behind bars for more than two years, although ill with AIDS and cancer. Svetlana Bakhmina, a Yukos lawyer with two small children, was jailed for four and a half years. Last year she gave birth to a daughter in a prison hospital and was released in April only after an international outcry.

DELIVERANCE, Khodorkovsky and his legal team believe, might lie in the West. In the aftermath of Khodorkovsky’s arrest, President Bush fell silent, and many old friends ran for cover, but in 2005, Senator Barack Obama co-sponsored, with John McCain and Joe Biden, Senate Resolution 322. The move was symbolic but caught the attention of many in Moscow, declaring that “it is the sense of the Senate that the criminal-justice system in Russia has not accorded” Khodorkovsky and Lebedev “fair, transparent and impartial treatment.” After Obama’s inauguration, as the new president pledged to hit the “reset button” on U.S.-Russia relations, the oligarch’s lawyers and lobbyists waited nervously. In July, on the eve of his first Moscow summit, President Obama offered a surprise.

“It does seem odd to me,” Obama told Novaya Gazeta, the last genuine newspaper in Russia, “that these new charges, which appear to be a repackaging of the old charges, should be surfacing now, years after these two individuals have been in prison and as they become eligible for parole.” The president cushioned it — “I would just affirm my support for President Medvedev’s courageous initiative to strengthen the rule of law in Russia.” But to Russian ears, Obama’s statement resounded like a slap in Putin’s face.

With or without the White House, Khodor­kovsky’s counterassault continues apace. At present, cases relating to his arrest and the takeover of Yukos have been heard, or will be soon, in a half-dozen European venues. Khodorkovsky looks forward, above all, to the battle at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The court is expected to hear the first of three cases Moskalenko has filed on his behalf, concerning his arrest and pretrial detention. The Kremlin faces another challenge in Strasbourg: a case brought by the American “management in exile” of Yukos, a claim said to be as high as $100 billion.

Still, Khodorkovsky has few illusions about the West. “Without a doubt,” he said of former supporters abroad, “they were only doing what they considered useful for their own country.”

“I’VE NEVER BEEN a corrupt state official, nor an autocrat,” Khodorkovsky wrote to me. He was subtly nodding to the duo often accused in Moscow, at times in public forums, of standing behind the Yukos case: Putin and Sechin, the Rosneft chairman who now controls Yukos’s assets. Khodorkovsky has, however, been careful to praise Putin’s heir. “I respect Dmitri Medvedev as the legitimate president of Russia,” he told the newspaper Sobesednik in March. “However, his political views are not fully clear to me. Yukos he certainly didn’t rob — and he has nothing to fear from me or Platon Lebedev. ”

If Medvedev has no reason to fear Khodor­kovsky, he could be the man to free him, or so holds a new school of thought. Among the last of Moscow’s incorrigible liberals, it has become fashionable to speak of the trial as an “opportunity”: a chance for Medvedev to rid himself of an inherited albatross and prove he is his own man. Early in his tenure, Medvedev swore to combat Russia’s “legal nihilism” — a euphemism for judicial corruption. The new president is also tech-savvy — he sports an iPhone and a video blog. If Yeltsin lived in a bubble and Putin was tethered to a self-serving intelligence network, Medvedev can Web-surf and see how the world sees Russia. The “new cold war,” the murders of human rights activists, investigative reporters and liberal politicians, and the rumors of arms shipments to Iran — he knows the news is bad. So great is the hope that Medvedev is a liberal waiting for his moment, and the lack of faith in a just trial, that Russian commentators have raised the unlikely idea of a pardon.

In July, Medvedev laid out the terms. “The procedure has to be carried out in accordance with our country’s rules,” the president told Italian reporters. “In other words, a person must appeal to the president, plead guilty to having committed a crime and seek the appropriate resolution. So at this point,” he added coyly, “there’s nothing to discuss.” The half-denials, coming in rapid succession, have only fueled the speculation. Back in 2002 and 2003, as the battle turned to war and executives became prisoners, Khodorkovsky counted Medvedev, who became Putin’s chief of staff days after his arrest, on his side. That perception, however wishful, may explain his willingness to suspend disbelief and, as he told me, “support Medvedev’s efforts” by not defending himself in overtly political terms in court.

His lawyer Moskalenko, however, does not await an awakening. “Even if Medvedev signed a pardon,” she says, “I have strong doubts this piece of paper would get beyond the walls of the Kremlin.” Experience underlies the statement. Medvedev is said to have signed such a pardon last year, for the then-pregnant Bakhmina. It never reached her lawyers. As for the prisoner himself? “No one, except two people in the country, know how long I’ve got until my release — or if it will ever come.”

He once had a choice, the lawyers say with reluctance. Not long after the arrest, a deal was on Putin’s desk: exile or jail. In time, many would flee, from Khodorkovsky’s closest partners to accountants whose faces he would not know. They live in restless exile, in England, Greece, Israel, Spain and the United States. Khodor­kovsky holds no enmity for those who fled — “Why breed hostages?” he says. But for him, the door was not open. “I’d rather be a political prisoner,” he told Moskalenko, “than a political refugee.”

The trial continues, now with a parade of witnesses. Khodorkovsky, who once boasted that his empire had adopted “paperless technology,” has reading material to outlast the year. But he looks, more and more, to that distant horizon. He’d like to return to the energy sector, he says. Not oil this time, but “solar,” a subject from his institute days. He could also lend a hand, he says, in raising Russia from the recession. After all, he has proved himself to be a “good crisis manager.”

One morning in June, a day before the defendant’s 46th birthday, a pair from Washington remained in court at the end of the day’s session. Margery Kraus, head of APCO, the D.C. lobbying firm, clasped her hands overhead. A victory salute. Eugene Lawson, former head of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, a group that aimed to unite mistrustful C.E.O.’s in a mutually enriching embrace, repeated the gesture. With his silvery hair and dark pinstripes, Lawson looked every bit the patrician guest from the West. In 2007, Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship. Last year, Lawson was named to APCO’s international advisory council. He faced the glass, raised a hand, fingers flat, to cut through the air at an angle — an airplane zooming into flight. We’re heading home, the American hands said, but we stand behind you.

The courtroom guards closed ranks, unlocked the cage and handcuffed Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, each to a guard. On the stairwell outside, the crowd, mostly women, young and old, called out — they wished him well on his birthday. The man who many still believe remains a billionaire wore slippers, thin trousers, a suede coat and a sleeveless shirt buttoned to the top — all well-worn. We came within inches of each other. In one hand he carried a string bag, filled with his notes and a plastic bottle nearly empty of water. He passed by in silence, lips pursed in a half-grin, up the stairs, and in a moment, amid the thud of boots on cement, the world’s most problematic political prisoner was gone.

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This week Vladimir Putin's regime proved an even colder and darker place than what a Russian winter alone can offer.

Ethicists may debate when not preventing a death becomes murder. But one doesn't need a Ph.D. to conclude that the death of Sergei Magnitsky was just that—a state sanctioned murder. Don't expect Moscow to recognize it as such: It doesn't have to. Unlike the execution-style killings of human-rights campaigners Natalya Estemirova and Stanislav Markelov and journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Anastasia Baburova, or the polonium poisoning of defector Alexander Litvinenko, Magnitsky's demise can, with technical honesty, be attributed to «natural causes»: toxic shock, heart failure, or rupture to his abdominal membrane, depending on which Russian official you ask. All as natural as the will to power.

The 37-year old Russian lawyer and father of two died in a detention center in Moscow on Monday, having been incarcerated for nearly a year, no trial in sight, on trumped-up tax evasion charges. His real crime was to claim widespread corruption by Russian Interior Ministry officials while defending Hermitage Capital Management against frauds. Late in 2008, Magnitsky gave formal testimony naming Interior Ministry officers involved in Hermitage's case. Shortly after, he was arrested by a team of the same officers named in his testimony, according to Hermitage. Over the last year, Magnitsky's detention conditions worsened the longer he refused to fabricate a story against Hermitage.

In other words, Magnitsky died fighting for the rule of law in a country that has no national memory of what that concept means.

Hermitage chief William Browder describes his late attorney as «a healthy 37-year-old professional» when he entered the jail. But being completely cut off from his family, and the physical pressures he endured while in custody, proved too much. Magnitsky made numerous official complaints of his treatment, including a 40-page report to the general prosecutor describing squalid conditions, treatment bordering on torture, and the onset of gallbladder stones, pancreatitis, and a severe digestive ailment.

«Prior to confinement, I didn't have these illnesses or at least there were no symptoms,» he writes in the report, detailing how repeated requests for treatment were ignored.

When Magnitsky's lawyers came to see him at the Butyrskaya prison on Monday, they were told he couldn't leave his cell due to the state of his health. And yet Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Dudukina said there was no record of health problems in Magnitsky's file.

The slow-motion assassination of the young lawyer marks a new low in Russia. The families of Estemirova, Politkovskaya, Markelov, Baburova, and Litvinenko at least get no argument that their loved ones were murdered, even if the official «investigations» into those crimes will likely prove useless.

An official investigation is planned into Magnitsky's death, but here we suspect the proceedings will prove worse than ineffectual—expect the conclusion in this case that malice played no part in his demise.

With this new milestone, Moscow consummates the marriage of brutality and revisionism. Contemporary Russia is almost comically weak when viewed from the West, which once feared Moscow would destroy the world. But that doesn't mitigate the merger of Stalinism with Putinism, nor the tragedy that means for the Russian people.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6902642.ece?token=null&offset=96&page=9

4 Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)
Party nature documentary, part philosophical tract, Herzog’s eerie account of the life and brutal death of mildly unhinged bear-watcher Timothy Treadwell is a monumental piece of cinema — emotionally satisfying, intellectually stimulating, but primal to the core.

3 No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 2007)
The alchemic combination of the Coen brothers’ eloquent precision and Cormac McCarthy’s vivid nihilism makes for a bleakly compelling cycle of violence. The only thing more terrifying than Javier Bardem’s haircut is the clinical efficiency of his murders.

2 The Bourne Supremacy / The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2004, 2007)
The action movie is dragged, kicking and back-flipping, into the Noughties courtesy of Matt Damon’s amnesiac superspy and director Greengrass’s film-making élan. Marrying jittery docu-style camera work with healthy political cynicism, Greengrass transformed Bourne into an anti-Bond for the PlayStation generation.

1 Hidden (Cache) (Michael Haneke, 2005)
It is only as the decade draws to a close that it becomes clear just how presciently the Austrian director Michael Haneke tapped into the uncertain mood of the Noughties. The film’s twin themes resonate perfectly with the defining concerns of the time: tacit national guilt about a questionable foreign policy, in the film it’s France’s occupation of Algeria, but it’s not hard to piece together the parallels with more recent conflicts. Plus, as round-the-clock surveillance became a part of our daily lives, here was a film that captured the creeping paranoia that resulted from the eyes of unseen strangers invading private life.

Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche star as Georges and Anne Laurent, the successful couple whose charmed life is disrupted by a series of covertly captured videotapes of their family and home. The campaign pertains to some unspoken and long suppressed event. Auteuil and Binoche are both excellent — their brittle, abrupt performances etch out the fracture lines in their crumbling relationship. But the film’s brilliance comes from two striking, perplexing moments in the film. The first is a shockingly violent suicide that catches the audience off guard. The second is the film’s ambivalent ending — a long shot of a meeting on some steps which could signal the end of the family’s torment, or the beginning of something worse. There have been rumours of an American remake with Ron Howard, of all people, directing. Hopefully common sense will prevail.

16 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
Testing the limits of narrative convolutions and visual technique, Gondry directs an ingenious script about memory-wiping. A central tempestuous romance between Jim Carrey’s Joel and Kate Winslet’s Clementine, however, is never once overshadowed.

15 Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)
One of the most extraordinary cinematic explorations of failure, disappointment and thwarted ambition ever made, this tale of Hitler's final days features a savage, dazzling performance by Bruno Ganz.

14 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
The tale of an illegal mid-term abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania was never going to be easy. And though the details are harrowing, Mungiu, a former journalist, has such compassion for his heroines Otilia and Gabita that the pain is almost palatable. Almost.

13 This Is England (Shane Meadows, 2007)
Meadows’s most personal film is a real treat, combining the director’s impeccably observed comedy with a gathering storm cloud of ominous ill will and violence. Honest, authentic and ultimately shattering.

12 The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
A mercilessly efficient account of Stasi surveillance in mid-1980s East Germany is anchored by a haunting performance from Ulrich Mühe, who died from stomach cancer just after the film’s release.

11 Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006)
The decade’s favourite sexist, anti-Semitic, racist homophobe, Borat picked at the scabs of America’s intolerance and hypocrisy. Sacha Baron Cohen’s status as the most fearless man in comedy is unlikely to be challenged in the near future.

10 Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
Provocative London-born artist McQueen directs a revelatory Michael Fassbender in a movie that purports to tackle the infamous 1981 IRA hunger strikes but is actually a hypnotic meditation on the ineffable mystery of human life. Achingly profound.

9 The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006)
Compassionate and intelligent, witty and wicked, this account of what happened behind the Palace gates after the death of the Princess of Wales is a crown jewel of a movie. Helen Mirren is a very human HM.

8 Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006)
The high camp of the Brosnan era Bond is ditched, and Fleming’s hero returns rebooted (and Bourne-ified), with an intense turn from Daniel Craig, and some breakneck set-pieces. An opening parkour-style chase through Madagascar sets the tone.

7 The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, 2006)
Forest Whitaker gives one of the great performances of the decade as Idi Amin. He nails the Ugandan dictator’s deadly charm — he’s a charismatic monster; part amiable buffoon, part stone-cold killer.

6 Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)
Twelve years after Trainspotting, Boyle produces a dizzying Mumbai-set romance that redefines the possibilities of a progressive yet commercially successful national industry. Oscars abound.

5 Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004)
The South Park creators launch an assault on pretty much everyone, from North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il to poor, hapless Matt Damon. It’s jaw-droppingly offensive and wildly funny.

28 The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007)
The true story of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who, after a stroke, was left paralysed and able to communicate only through blinking his left eye. The film takes us inside Bauby's wrecked body and charms us with his still rebellious wit.

27 Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)
A sozzled road trip in Californian wine country leads to a mid-life crisis for divorced failed writer and wine buff Miles (Paul Giametti), best man to sleazy charmer Jack (Thomas Haden Church).

26 Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)
A pinnacle for Spielberg and star Tom Cruise, this near-future sci-fi depicts a world of psychic crime- stoppers but is rooted in old fashioned film noir.

25 Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier, 2000)
This musical melodrama was as emotionally subtle as a coach load of orphans and kittens driving off a cliff — and yet there was something about the florid excesses that gelled perfectly with star Bjork's heart-wrenching score.

24 28 Days Later… (Danny Boyle, 2002)
Danny Boyle and Beach novelist Alex Garland re-imagine the zombie movie for the 21st century. Here, the zombies move with lightning speed, and are fuelled not by the dark arts but by rage itself.

23 Man On Wire (James Marsh, 2008)
This lyrical documentary tells the story of Philippe Petit, who strung a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and danced on it, for no reason other than to create something beautiful for the people far below.

22 Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
The social facades of 1950s Connecticut slowly crack apart in a gorgeous Technicolor-style melodrama. Julianne Moore is riveting as the homemaker whose life is upended by her husband’s homosexuality and her own feelings for gardener Dennis Haysbert.

21 Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005)
This ode to a past era of challenging TV journalism is authentic down to the last swirl of late-night cigarette smoke. David Strathairn impresses as Edward R. Murrow, the television journalist locking horns with Senator Joseph McCarthy.

20 Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
Head-tripping sci-fi goes to high school in an Eighties-set psychological thriller with dark Lynchian overtones. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the titular teen — a possible paranoid schizophrenic who may just have the key to time travel.

19 United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006)
Shattering, sobering and uncompromising, Greengrass’s masterful drama set onboard one of the 9/11 hijacked planes is resolutely unsensational — and is all the more powerful for it.

18 Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
The biggest vampire movie of 2008 was Twilight, but its bloodless inanities were exposed by this Swedish chiller. Here Kare Hedebrant plays a bullied pre-teen whose burgeoning relationship with an equally alienated girl-vampire radically alters his dull suburban existence.

17 Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
This achingly sad love story gave Heath Ledger a chance to explore hitherto unsuspected depths. It’s a hugely powerful performance — his inarticulate yearning is almost painful to watch

40 Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005)
George Clooney produces and stars in a withering account of petrol politics in the Middle East. Fine performances from Matt Damon, Christopher Plummer and William Hurt, plus a cracking sense of pace, help to mollify a core message of bleak corporate cynicism.

39 Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
Strangers in a strange place become soul mates for a few stolen days. Bill Murray is gloriously hang dog as a movie star in crisis; Scarlett Johansson is utterly disarming as the neglected newlywed.

38 Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Lynch at his brash elliptical best with Naomi Watts as Betty, an aspiring actress who becomes the unwitting star of her own twisted film noir.

37 In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
Heart-stoppingly lovely and exquisitely sad, elegantly erotic and impeccably stylish — this romantic tone poem is a thing of real beauty.

36 Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2004)
Bizarre and compelling, Andrew Jarecki’s documentary began as a portrait of New York clown David Friedman but segued into an analysis of Friedman’s pressured family life — complete with brother Jesse and father Arnold, both convicted paedophiles.

35 Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2002)
Two teenage boys and an older woman in crisis take a road trip to an elusive “perfect” beach in this sexually charged Mexican comedy drama. Cuaron’s restless camera-work gives an unexpected depth to the story.

34 Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton/Lee Unkrich, 2003)
The Pixar trademarks are all there — rapid-fire badinage, ravishing visuals, and sympathetic characters. But this tale of a timid clownfish tracking his kidnapped son carries, like a subaqueous Searchers, a genuinely mythic uppercut.

33 Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair, 2002)
There are few directors better than Mira Nair at capturing the mercurial tensions of domestic life. And with this vivid, richly textured portrait of a Punjabi wedding she is at her absolute best.

32 Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)
The sheer audacity! Taking a dead genre — the sword’n’sandals movie — and not just reviving it, but creating an Oscar-winning box-office sensation into the bargain.

31 Iraq in Fragments (James Longley, 2006)
Remarkable photography and a glimpse of Iraq on the streets rather than from inside an armoured vehicle — this little-seen film is one of the decade’s most impressive documentaries.

30 Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002)
Yes, this scandalous revenge drama boasts a vile nine-minute rape sequence and a hideous opening mutilation. But it’s also a moral movie that refuses to sanction violence and remains, for strong stomachs at least, unforgettable.

29 Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 2000)
The film that introduced the surreal genius of writer Charlie Kaufman to the world, this endlessly inventive riff on the nature of identity and celebrity is a milestone in moviemaking.

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The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed all civilization and, apparently, most life on earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006.

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The Road is an upcoming film directed by John Hillcoat and written by Joe Penhall. Based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men. The film stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Filming took place in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Oregon. The film is scheduled to be released on November 25, 2009.^[1]

The Times. The 100 best books of the decade

1 The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Cormac McCarthy’s gripping, shattering novel walks in a long line of tradition. Mary Shelley tried her hand at the literature of post-apocalypse with The Last Man, published in 1826; Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel, Riddley Walker, sets the aftermath of doom in Canterbury. The Road’s wilderness — coming to the cinema in January — is an American one: blasted, ruined, destroyed by an unnamed calamity that has scorched the Earth with biblical fury and lit McCarthy’s prose with holy fire. In this awful landscape walk a father and his young son, treading towards a future where it would seem there could be none.

McCarthy has always been a poet of extremity; his earlier novels stripped romance from the myth of the frontier. The Road is stripped back even farther, its father and son the near-sole survivors of what might be called humanity; the book’s narrative is simply that of their survival. There are respites from their suffering —- a cache or two of unspoilted tinned food —- but more often there is horror; this is existence pared to the bone. For this reason, it is McCarthy’s language that must carry the book, and so it does, triumphantly, its Hemingway-like concision shot through with cadences that sometimes recall the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The Road is our book of the decade; but it will outlast that judgment, too. It is a work of force and dark brilliance, a perfect expression of the early 21st-century’s terrors —- and of the hope we must all have that we shall not destroy ourselves, nor yet be destroyed. Erica Wagner

Cormac McCarthy on The Road
Four or five years ago, [my son John] and I went to El Paso, and we checked in to the old hotel there. And one night, John was asleep, it was probably about two or three o’clock in the morning, and I went over and just stood and looked out the window at this town. There was nothing moving but I could hear the trains going through, a very lonesome sound. I just had this image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years. I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and everything being laid to waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy. So I wrote two pages, and that was about the end of it. And then about four years later I realised that it wasn’t two pages of a book, it was a book, and it was about that man, and that boy.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_reviews/article6914181.ece?token=null&offset=192&page=17

3 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (2004)
The book that revealed Barack Obama as not just an ambitious politician, but also as an eloquent writer and deep thinker. The fascinating story of his early life, first published in 1995, was reissued in 2004 and became a worldwide bestseller as momentum for the presidency built.

2 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003)
With its feisty, irresistible heroine and shapely, naive style, Satrapi’s comic-book account of her childhood during the Islamic Revolution in Iran is hugely enjoyable — and an essential, humanising eye-opener on a little-understood country. From an interview with Oprah Winfrey, 2007

1 The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Cormac McCarthy’s gripping, shattering novel walks in a long line of tradition. Mary Shelley tried her hand at the literature of post-apocalypse with The Last Man, published in 1826; Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel, Riddley Walker, sets the aftermath of doom in Canterbury. The Road’s wilderness — coming to the cinema in January — is an American one: blasted, ruined, destroyed by an unnamed calamity that has scorched the Earth with biblical fury and lit McCarthy’s prose with holy fire. In this awful landscape walk a father and his young son, treading towards a future where it would seem there could be none.

McCarthy has always been a poet of extremity; his earlier novels stripped romance from the myth of the frontier. The Road is stripped back even farther, its father and son the near-sole survivors of what might be called humanity; the book’s narrative is simply that of their survival. There are respites from their suffering —- a cache or two of unspoilted tinned food —- but more often there is horror; this is existence pared to the bone. For this reason, it is McCarthy’s language that must carry the book, and so it does, triumphantly, its Hemingway-like concision shot through with cadences that sometimes recall the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The Road is our book of the decade; but it will outlast that judgment, too. It is a work of force and dark brilliance, a perfect expression of the early 21st-century’s terrors —- and of the hope we must all have that we shall not destroy ourselves, nor yet be destroyed. Erica Wagner

Cormac McCarthy on The Road
Four or five years ago, [my son John] and I went to El Paso, and we checked in to the old hotel there. And one night, John was asleep, it was probably about two or three o’clock in the morning, and I went over and just stood and looked out the window at this town. There was nothing moving but I could hear the trains going through, a very lonesome sound. I just had this image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years. I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and everything being laid to waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy. So I wrote two pages, and that was about the end of it. And then about four years later I realised that it wasn’t two pages of a book, it was a book, and it was about that man, and that boy. 

10 The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003)

A murder in the Louvre, and the clues are all hidden in the works of Leonardo. Some love it, some hate it (see our worst of the decade article), but you can’t deny that its mix of conspiracy, riddles and action dominated the decade.

9 Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)

A foolish act of bravado and a simple act of conceit at a 1930s house party combine to spoil three lives. Can amends be made? You either love or hate the postmodern twist at the end, but you cannot deny the brilliance of the descriptive set-pieces.

8 Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood (2008)

From Scrooge to Faustus, the Canadian seer’s fascinating examination of debt, balance and revenge in history, society and literature is essential reading for those curious about the breeding ground for our current financial turmoil.

7 Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2002)

Martel was an unknown when his compelling, amusing, eerie fable won the Man Booker Prize: the novel remains the bestselling Booker winner yet, and deservedly so. With a hero named after a swimming pool and a tiger named Richard Parker, this a book like no other.

Yann Martel on Life of Pi «I prepared Life of Pi in the quiet of my creative kitchen, thinking it was a delicious meal but worried that no one would join me. Were there readers out there willing to give animals and gods serious consideration? Well, Pi has proved to be a roaring feast. So many people have joined me at the table. And I'm grateful for that. It's no fun cooking just for yourself. Food is to be shared»

6 The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (2000)

By identifying the points at which trends and goods graduated from specialist tastes to mass-market phenomena, Gladwell established himself in the lucrative role of anatomist of contemporary success.

5 Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (2006)
Its astonishing rediscovery more than 40 years after Nemirovsky’s death in Auschwitz should not overshadow that the two novellas here are miniature masterpieces. In the first the veneer of civilisation is stripped from a group of Parisians fleeing the advancing Germans, while the second is a moving tale of forbidden love across the divide of war.

4 Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers trans Robert Bringhurst (2002) One hundred years ago Ghandl and Skaay, two great native poets of the northwest coast of Canada, spoke their stories aloud; Bringhurst’s translations and analysis bring a lost world brilliantly to life.

16 Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy (2005)

An intimate and emotionally frank collection of love poems that, following the course of a love affair from first spark through ecstatic conflagration to final burn-out, probably did a lot to earn its author her appointment as first female laureate.

15 The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006)

Dawkins showed that you could be a bestseller with a book positing a negative. His witheringly argued treatise against the notion of divine creation made him the poster boy for atheists, the thinker whose arguments every religious person must address.

14 Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (2003)

Nafisi’s reading group, set up in Tehran in the 1990s, was an assertion of identity and freedom. Her book offers a depiction of a society in a time of war and a celebration of literature.

Azar Nafisi on Reading Lolita in Tehran «People often say, what can we do for Iranians? The point implicit in my book was: Look at what these young Iranians are doing for you. They are reminding you of the best in your own culture, and showing you how through imagination one can connect»

13 Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald (2001) Sebald’s masterpiece: the story of a man’s search for his lost history. Austerlitz comes to England in 1939 on the kindertransport. Raised by a Welsh minister who tells him nothing about his real family, he returns to his birthplace 50 years later.

12 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2000)

With this modestly titled calling card, the most influential young author of the decade announced his arrival. As well as writing books and screenplays, Eggers has been, as editor of the journal and imprint McSweeney’s, the centre of a literary coterie.

11 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, in a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2007)

The greatest novel in the world is given new life by the remarkable translating team who have already blown the dust off Dostoevsky; if there is one essential desert island book, this is it — the literary equivalent of digital remastering.

22 The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (2000)

 

The concluding volume of Pullman’s trilogy — His Dark Materials — is not the finest. But it is the culmination of a stunning achievement, and it was the first “children’s” book to win Whitbread Book of the Year.

21 The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)

A peculiar, chilling fantasy. In an alternative America, the Aryan supremacist and aviator Charles Lindbergh becomes President in 1940 and persecution of the Jews begins — as narrated by an alternative Philip Roth.

20 White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)

This dazzling first novel became a classic as soon as it appeared. No voice like Smith’s had yet been heard — clever, wise, street-smart and riotously inventive.

19 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)

Franzen is the author who famously turned down Oprah. He could afford to. The novel is a triumph, exploring the fragmentation of one middle-class family as they gather for a Midwestern Christmas — ailing, embittered parents and their unsatisfactory adult children.

18 Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (2008)

Goldacre, a hospital doctor, is a witty debunker of all forms of bad science: quack medicines, ropey dietary theories, incompetent reporting. At a time of increasing credulity, he is a tonic.

17 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling (2007)

The final adventure in the most successful series of all time — Harry, now a teenager, helped by his Hogwarts mates Ron and Hermione, vanquishes the Dark Lord and his minions, avenges his dead parents and lives happily ever after.

27 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

Yours for £1,500, though available free to many library users, the new ODNB received a good deal of criticism at publication for alleged factual inaccuracies. Now that the fuss has died down, we can see these 60 volumes as an immense publishing achievement.

26 Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000)

This award-winning memoir recalls Sage’s isolated childhood in the Welsh borders during the 1940s and 1950s — a harrowing and humorous recreation of an isolated, austere and sometimes frightening world.

25 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (2003)

A runaway bestseller hailed as a successor to The Catcher in the Rye for its sensitive depiction of an autistic teenager. Christopher is 15, a maths genius with a terror of ordinary social situations, whose investigation of a dog’s death reveals truths about his parents.

24 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

Hailsham appears to be a typical English boarding school, but the students are taught nothing about the outside world. Kathy, a former student, discovers that they are all clones, specially bred to provide spare organs.

23 The 9/11 Commission Report (2004)

Thanks to the internet, this report, a bestseller in book form, probably received wider dissemination than had any previous document of its kind.

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http://traduko.lib.ru/dics_en_en.html

• Bbi Combinatory Dictionary of English, 1986 г. 
• Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary, 5th edition, 2006 г. 
• Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition, 2004 г. 
• Longman Dictionary of Common Errors, 2009 г. 
• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 5th edition, 2009 г. (Добавлены звуковые файлы 5 ноября 2009 г.)
• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Extras, 5th edition, 2009 г. (Добавлен 15 ноября 2009 г.)
• Longman Language Activator, 2nd edition, 2000 г. 
• Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 3rd edition, 2008 г. (Добавлены звуковые файлы 5 ноября 2009 г.)
• Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, 2003 г. (Добавлены звуковые файлы 5 ноября 2009 г.)
• Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus, 2003 г. 
• Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, 7th edition, 2005 г. (Добавлены звуковые файлы 5 ноября 2009 г.)
• Oxford Collocations Dictionary, 2nd edition, 2009 год. (Добавлен 15 ноября 2009 г.)
• Oxford Guide to British and American Culture, 2nd edition, 2005 год.
• Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd edition, 2005 год.
• Soule's Dictionary of English Synonyms.
• Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, 2003 г. 

http://www.izcity.com/data/soft/article1888.htm

GOM Player был разработан в Корее и включает в себя различные функции, другими словами GOM Player – представитель программ «всё в одном», как и первый проигрыватель в нашем обзоре KMPlayer. Этот проигрыватель мало весит по сравнению с другими плеерами – около пяти мегабайт, при этом подключать какие-либо дополнительные фильтры не придётся, хотя если GOM Player столкнётся с неизвестным ему файлом, то предложит вам скачать нужный кодек с официального сайта, так что проблем с просмотром фильмов не будет.
Функциональность GOM Player тоже на высоте, в частности, плеер позволяет изменять размер изображения так, как вам нужно, например, манипулировать с соотношением сторон или подгонять размер изображения под формат и разрешение экрана, при этом практически не теряя качество картинки.

Интерфейс программы также радует – он приятен и удобен, кроме того, в проигрывателе есть привычные пользователям Windows Media Player и Crystal Player горячие клавиши, благодаря чему вы легко перейдёте с одного плеера на другой, по сути, даже не заметив разницы.
Если вам не нравится цветовая гамма видео, то вы сможете настроить яркость, контраст и насыщенность по собственному усмотрению. Кроме того, проигрыватель имеет инструменты для работы с субтитрами, позволяет подключать внешние фильтры и многое другое.

Есть в программе и возможность проигрывания повреждённых AVI-файлов, а также при необходимости, воспользовавшись специальными инструментами, вы сможете наложить дополнительные эффекты на приглушенную звуковую дорожку. Если же ваш компьютер не сможет справиться с проигрыванием HDTV, то плеер активирует Quick Play Mode, благодаря которому видео оптимизируется для просмотра, правда, с небольшой потерей качества изображения.

 

GOM player (rus 21204830)

Stephen Fry in America is a six part BBC television series in which Stephen Fry travels across America to reveal a country in which he was almost born. Just before Fry was born, his father was offered a job at Princeton University, in New Jersey, but chose to turn it down in favour of Hampstead. In the six-part series he travels, mostly in a London cab, through all 50 U.S. states of the country that he could have nearly called home and which has always fascinated him. The episodes are regularly repeated on Dave, lasting an hour and twenty minutes due to advertising breaks. It was aired in America on HDNet.

download avi torrent

Stephen Fry in America: Fifty States and the Man Who Set Out to See Them All

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (November 3, 2009)
• download fb2.zip ebook —full text and all  pictures (subscription)

Britain's best-loved comic genius, Stephen Fry, turns his celebrated wit and insight to unearthing the real America as he travels across the continent in his chariot of Englishness, a black London cab.

Stephen Fry has always loved America. In fact, he came very close to being born here. His fascination for the country and its people sees him embarking on an epic journey across America, visiting each of its fifty states to discover how such a huge diversity of people, cultures, languages, and beliefs creates such a remarkable nation. Stephen starts his journey on the East Coast and zigzags across America, stopping in every state from Maine to Hawaii, talking to each state's hospitable citizens, listening to music, visiting landmarks, viewing small-town life and America's breathtaking landscapes, following wherever his curiosity leads him.

En route he discovers the South Side of Chicago with blues legend Buddy Guy, catches up with Morgan Freeman in Mississippi, strides around with Ted Turner on his Montana ranch, marches with Zulus in Mardi Gras in New Orleans, drums with the Sioux Nation in South Dakota, joins a Georgia family for Thanksgiving, «picks» with bluegrass hillbillies, and finds himself in a Tennessee garden full of dead bodies.

Whether in a club for failed gangsters in Brooklyn, New York (yes, those are real bullet holes), or celebrating Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts (is there anywhere better?), Stephen is welcomed by the people of America—mayors, sheriffs, newspaper editors, park rangers, teachers, and hoboes, bringing to life the oddities and splendors of each locale. A celebration of the magnificent and the eccentric, the beautiful and the strange, Stephen Fry in America is the author's homage to this extraordinary country.

Издательство: Новое литературное обозрение
Год: 2009
Страниц: 530
Формат: djvu
Размер: 2,6 Мб
ISBN: 9785-86793678-5
Качество: хорошее
Язык: билингва — английский, русский

http://www.english-club.tv/ru/Home.html

English Club TV - тематический телеканал с интересными обучающими программами, фильмами, музыкой, а также анонсами новых художественных фильмов  адресован для всех тех, кто изучает и совершенствует английский язык.

 

Телеканал English Club TV вещает с 15 августа 2008 г и доступен для просмотра со спутника Sirius 4 (4,8Е), в кабельных сетях Украины, а с конца 1 квартала 2009г в кабельных сетях России, Литвы, Латвии и т.д.

PS

Украинский телеканал на русском языке для изучающих английский язык вещает в Москве в пакете Corbina Beeline TV. Идея интересная, воплощение пока не очень, но уже есть полезные программы. Например, новости с субтитрами на английском и русском, показ голливудских фильмов на английском с русскими субтитрами (для пополняющих активный словарный запас полезнее английские субтитры, я как тренер-практик вам говорю :) ,  разные рубрики на английском с русскими субтитрами, кино-трейлеры фильмов на английском с английскими субтитрами (самая полезная рубрика, на мой взгляд !)  Единственное, что мне совсем не нравится, это то, что все закадровое озвучание идет на американском английском непрофессиональными голосами. ВВ

Last Night in Twisted River is a 2009 novel by John Irving.

It uses many of the themes and plot devices that have already seen treatment in other works by the author.^[1]

The story, which spans 51 years from 1954 to 2005, concerns a boy and his father who flee a logging community in northwest New Hampshire after a tragic accident.

DOWNLOAD FB2.zip ebook ( subscription)

 

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County–to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto–pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.

In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River–John Irving’s twelfth novel–depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” From the novel’s taut opening sentence–“The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long”–to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving’s breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp.

What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author’s unmistakable voice–the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: “We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly–as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth–the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.”

 

After a three novel fixation on sex both domestic and abroad, John Irving makes a triumphant return to the literary landscape of The World According to Garp (Modern Library) in his twelfth novel, «Last Night in Twisted River». Father Dominic Baciagalupo, a cook for a logging community, and his son Daniel are co-protagonists in a story about manhood, family, love, friendship, a whole lot of cooking, and of course sex (though the sexual exploits of the characters don't overwhelm the story). At first it's the world of logging that pulls you into the story, much as the waters of Twisted River pull young logger Angel Pope into an early death in the novel's first sentence.

The first section of the book, set in the 1950s in the far north of New Hampshire, is absolutely captivating. As with Irving's early novels, a bear plays an important and almost mythical role. The middle section follows Dominic and now writer Danny in an odyssey brought about by their last night in Twisted River, the events of which cause them to vacate the logging town. Unrepentant logger Ketchum, who remains in the woods, plays a significant role in both lives, despite trying to keep his distance. Like TS Garp, Danny becomes a novelist. In the last half of the book the writer struggles with the tragedies of his life  both accidental («it's a world of accidents», warns his father) and arranged (despite the best efforts of the ever-vigilant Ketchum) - and with crafting novels, striking a balance between the autobiographical and the imagination. Again, the result sweeps you along in its current.

It's not quite a perfect novel  the middle section is a bit choppy as Irving moves back and forth in time in the lives of both Dominic and Danny, but the beginning and last third are so good that you'll forgive any minor structural flaws. As a benefit, you'll also pick up a few Italian cooking recipes along the way and perhaps embark on a search for the perfect pizza.

In my review of Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone: A novel, I stated that the protege had outwritten the master. With «Last Night in Twisted River», the master has come back strong.

If novels like «The Fourth Hand» and «Until I Find You» put you off of Irving, come back for «Twisted River». You'll be glad you did.

(500) Days of Summer is a 2009 American romantic comedy film. It was written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, directed by Marc Webb, produced by Mark Waters, and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Principal photography began in April 2008 in Los Angeles, California. The film made its debut at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and was a hit with festival audiences. It was picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight Pictures and opened in US and Canadian limited release on July 17, 2009, later expanding to wide release in the US on August 7, 2009.^[2] The film was also released on September 2, 2009, in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, and opened in Australia on September 17, 2009.

 

download avi video in English

english subtitles

http://umopit.ru/ETrainer.htm

• Тренажёр предлагает задания профессиональной сложности на перевод фраз. Выставляет оценку.
• Номер версии программы соответствует количеству имеющихся в ней заданий.
• Можно установить желаемое направление перевода.
• Можно установить количество заданий в экзамене от 5 до 50.
• Можно ограничить время, отпущенное на одно задание.
• Ведется подробный протокол экзамена.
• Можно посмотреть список всех заданий и статистику.
• С помощью фильтрующего поиска можно использовать список заданий в качестве справочника.
• Есть режим повторения пройденного.
• Можно использовать развивающие звуковые комментарии к действиям пользователя.
• Имеется встроенное «Интернет-обновление».

Полная версия, содержащая 5500 учебных заданий и более 1440 звуковых комментариев:

Файл ETrainer.zip (44 786 K)
отсюда или отсюда

 

PS.

Лучшая бесплатная российская программа с тестами по английской грамматике, словоупотреблению

 

Источники

Baby TV;
BBC TV;
Reality TV;
VoA Wordmaster;
www.betteratenglish.com
www.classes.ru;
www.coolenglishpodcasts.com;
www.dictionary.com;
www.englishpod.com;
www.englishteacherjohn.com;
www.qstudy.ru;
www.slangcity.com;
www.voanews.com;
Фильмы: About A Boy, Analyze This, Braveheart, Clockwork Orange, Dead Man, Dogma, Gladiator, Gone With The Wind, Harry Potter, Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Leon, Lord Of The Rings, Magnolia, Meet The Parents, Shawshank Redemption, The Devil's Advocate, The Matrix, The Mummy;
ABBYY Lingvo 12;
Ю. В. Бодрова. «Русские пословицы и поговорки и их английские аналоги», АСТ, 2007;
Cool English Magazine, 2006;
Esquire, 2005;
Ami Gillett. Speak English Like An American, Language Success Press, 2004;
С. И. Тобольская. «Капризы и прихоти английского языка», «Лицей», 2004;
Л. Васильева. «Краткость — душа остроумия. Английские пословицы, поговорки, крылатые выражения», «Центрполиграф», 2004;
Peter Hancock. English Pronunciation In Use, Cambridge University Press, 2003;
Wayne Magnuson. English Idioms, Sayings and Slang, Prairie House Books, 2003;
Н. Белинская. «Идиомы», 2003;
С. С. Хидекель, М. Р. Кауль, Е. Л. Гинзбург. «Трудности английского словоупотребления», Астрель, 2002;
В. Д. Ившин. «Синтаксис речи современного английского языка», 2002;
R. A. Spears. NTC's American Idioms Dictionary, 2000;
The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, Oxford University Press, 1999;
The Oxford Russian Dictionary, Oxford-Moscow, 1999;
Brian Lockett. Beyond the Dictionary, «Глосса», 1999;
A.J. Worrall. English Idioms for Foreign Students, 1999;
Л. И. Белина. «English Proverbs», «Росмэн», 1998;
Max Hueber Verlag. TOEFL Preparation Course Self Study Pack, 1999;
The New International Webster's Student Dictionary of the English Language, Trident Press International, 1996;
Galvan Javier. Ingles esencial: basic-intermediate, 1996;
«Типичные ошибки в английском языке», «Буклет», 1994;
А. В. Бушуев, Т. С. Бушуева. «Краткий словарь американского слэнга», 1993;
M. Benson, E. Benson, R. Ilson. The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990;
J. Ayto. The Longman Register of New Words, Longman Group UK Limited, 1990;
А. И. Розенман, Ю. Д. Апресян. «Англо-русский синонимический словарь», «Русский язык», 1988;
The Oxford-Duden Pictorial English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1987;
В. К. Мюллер. «Англо-русский словарь», «Русский язык», 1985;
Jane Povey. Get It Right, 1984;
А. В. Кунин. «Англо-русский фразеологический словарь», «Русский язык», 1984;
Longman Active Study Dictionary of English, Longman Group Limited, 1983.

В полнозвуковой версии использованы фрагменты произведений следующих исполнителей:
Aerosmith, Amanda Marshall, Anastacia, Backstreet Boys, Barbara Klein, Beastie Boys, BEP, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Big Sandy, Bill Skundrich, Blackstreet, Blue, Bob Doughty, Bob Dylan, Boney M, Bonnie Tyler, Britney Spears, Bryan Adams, Can, Cary Grant, CCS, Chris Rea, Clear, Coldplay, David Bowie, David Byrne, Deep Purple, Elton John, Elvis Presley, Eminem, Extreme, Faith Lapidus, Fish, Foghat, Geordie, George Michael, Good Friend, Gorillaz, Grateful Dead, Green Day, Hole, Ian Gillan, Ice T, Jennifer Lopez, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jetix, John Koons, John Mayer, John Strohm, Johnny Cash, Ken Carroll, Kimberley Locke, Leonard Cohen, Lima, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Lou Bega, Love Inc, Lowell Fulson, Madonna, Maroon 5, Meat Loaf, Mis-teeq, Monkees, Morrissey, Muddy Waters, Natalie Imbruglia, Nickelback, Nirvana, No Doubt, No Mercy, Orbital, Pamela Munro, Paul Kearney, Paul Weller, Pink, Pink Floyd, Queen, Rare Bird, Rednex, Reef, Rich Kleinfeldt, Roxette, Sade, Safety Groove, Sam Brown, Savage Garden, Scooter, Seven Red Seven, Sheryl Crow, Shania Twain, Shirley Bassey, Sinead O'Connor, Slade, Smash Mouth, Smokey, Spice Girls, Status Quo, Steve Ember, Stone The Crows, Suzi Quatro, Swift, Tanita Tikaram, The Beatles, The Cardigans, The Offspring, The Rolling Stones, Tom Jones, Tom McRae, Tony McPhee, Triumph, Twisted Sister, Walter Trout, Warren Scheer, Weezer, Westlife, Whitney Houston, Will Smith, Wings, Yello.

http://career-english.ru/index/0—90

Вы слушаете new age, classical, neo-classical, crossover, opera, soundtracks, instrumental, jazz, world music из моей коллекции в 21322 композиций в mp3 качестве со скоростью 128 kbps в прямом эфире (с задержкой 10—60 секунд)


OM.DA.RU Radio в отдельном окне  (Работает стабильнее всего, можно эту страницу сделать в закладки, будут видны названия композиций, проигрываемых в данный момент, если радио включено



В Windows media player, а также в  KM Player , Winamp, Screamer,  Foobar (будут видны названия композиций)
http://87.117.197.148:7213

или вот прямая ссылка, которая должна запустить  Winamp или другой плейер

Удобнее всего пользоваться интернет радиоплейером Screamer, в котором можно добавлять ссылки на свои любимые радиостанции. Вот portable версия, которая запускается без установки с моими избранными 165  радиостанциями, на первом месте в списке мое радио OM.DA.Ru, которое я запускаю в эфир, когда есть настроение

download zip Screamer Portable internet radio with 165 stations from Vlad

(разархивируйте папку с файлами на флешку , которую потом можно запускать на любом компьютере без установки, нажмите в папке файл screamer.exe, у вас должна запуститься радиостанция BBC 4 , нажав на кнопку Закладки, можно выбрать любую из других 165 станций (OM.DA.RU будет под номером один, перед началом композиции плейер показывает название и автора у многих станций, в том числе у OM.DA.RU , а также вы можете слушать сотни станций- на английском, немецком, французском, русском, классическая музыка в хорошем качестве 128, джаз, new age, soundtracks, можно добавить новые, если они вещают в wma или Mp3.)

McGraw-Hill | 200910-05 | ISBN: 0071629165 | 208 pages | PDF | 1 MB
Put these words to work for you!
Learn the gift of gab and get closer to your dream job

This latest addition to the bestselling Perfect Phrases series is a must-read for anyone who dreads networking or who has ever fumbled or frozen during important and possibly career-changing conversations. Perfect Phrases for Professional Networking arms readers with foolproof and versatile phrases that help them take advantage of virtually any professional networking opportunity.

KNOW WHAT TO SAY IN ANY SITUATION

From cocktail parties to industry conferences, association meetings, and even unexpected run-ins on the street, this book has all the tools you need to feel comfortable striking up a conversation, steering it in the right direction, and following up effectively. Whether you're looking for a promotion, considering a career change, or just hoping to update that rolodex for a rainy day, this handy resource has you covered-including new-media tactics such as e-mail etiquette, rules for social networking, and the proper way to leave a blog comment.

Author Susan Benjamin shows you how to:

# Break the ice
# Use personal connections to create a conversation
# Steer the conversation toward leads
# Ask for an invitation to an exclusive gathering
# Get through to someone who's putting you off
# Get new leads from an old contact
# Perfect your elevator pitch
# Send a cold e-mail that gets a response
# Make the most of online networking functions

No matter how tough networking is for you, the Perfect Phrases format makes it simple for you to start building connections today.

Enjoy this great book! Brought to you by SMIRK

Uploading

Название: Английский для русских. Курс английской разговорной речи
Автор: Караванова Н. Б.
Издательство: Эксмо
Год: 2009
Страниц: 224
Формат: rtf
Размер: 1,5 мб
ISBN 978—5699-35731-4

Предлагаемое издание — учебник нового, современного типа, базирующийся на последних разработках методики обучения языкам, максимально отвечающий потребностям современного общества.
Его основная цель — научить свободно и правильно говорить на английском языке, понимать разговорную речь и ее нюансы.
Отличительными чертами учебника являются:
- коммуникативная методика подачи и закрепления материала;
- перевод на английский язык лексики и диалогов учебника носителем языка;
- грамматические комментарии, написанные на основе сопоставительного изучения языков и имеющие также коммуникативную направленность.





depositfiles.com

http://tv.beeline.ru/msk/tv/index.wbp

Beeline TV — Единственная компания в Москве, которая предоставляет возможность записывать на цифровую приставку с жестким диском параллельно четыре телепередачи и смотреть пятую на любом из 125 телеканалов, при необходимости прерывать прямой эфир, нажимая на паузу до 90 минут, ставить приставку на запись разных телепередач на две недели вперед (установка бесплатно, аренда приставки 220 рублей в месяц, вся установка занимает 15 минут, если ваш дом подключен, нужно купить единые карты оплаты Beeline на 1000 рублей до прихода мастера) 

Для изучающих английский язык (расширенный пакет- 495 рублей в месяц, плюс 120 рублей за цифровую линию, если не пользуетесь интернетом , итого с арендой приставки около 850 рублей в месяц)  имеются следующие телеканалы на английском (русская и английская аудиодорожка или только на английском, у некоторых каналов есть дорожка на немецком или французском)

1  BBC World News
2.CNN International
3. BBC prime —лучшие развекательные передачи BBC, экранизации, сериалы, ситкомы, документальные фильмы
4. Russia Today- пропагандистский канал из России на английском языке
5. Dw TV- вещание час на немецком, час на английском
6. France 24 — на английском
7. Travel Channel — один из моих любимых каналов
8. Mezzo —классическая музыка и джаз —на французском и английском
9. SET —Sony Entertainment — развлекательные фильмы и сериалы
10. Universal — голливудские фильмы и сериалы
11. Travel and Living —  Дизайн, культура жилища
12. Discovery Science
13. Discovery World — отличные канал о культурах и цивилизациях
14. Discovery
15.National Geographic
16 .Animal Planet
17 Melody Zen TV- HD- природа и медитация на канале высокой четкости (нужен специальный телевизор, на обычном смотреть можно, но немного рябит)
18. RTG TV Russian Travel Guide — на русском и английском рассказывают о природе, традициях России,  новый проект заслуживает всяческого одобрения
19. English Club- новый российский телеканал для изучающих английский- обучающие программы для начинающих, а также телепрограммы на английском с русскими субтитрами
20 CNBC — деловой канал на английском
21. Bloomberg- деловой канал на английском
22. Hallmark — сентиментальные фильмы для домохозяек и фэнтези для детей
23. MGM — классика Голливуда
24. AXN sci-fi фантастика и мистика на английском и русском, например, показывают Lost
25. Sci-fi классика фантастики
26 ESPN спорт на английском и французском
27 Extreme Sport на русском и английском
28 Cartoon Network мультсериалы
29. Jetix —мультсериалы
30. Jetix play —мультсериалы
31. Nickelodeon — мультфильмы и подростковые сериалы и ситкомы
32 Baby TV-  мультфильмы для малышей
33. Fashion
34 World Fashion на французском, английском
35 Fashion TV HD- телеканал высокой четкости
36 Blue Hustler — эротика
37 Hustler — порно
38 Playboy TV- эротика
39 Private Space- порно
40 Luxe TV HD — об эксклюзивных вещах  и явлениях ТВ высокой четкости
41 World Music
42 VH1 —классика рок и поп музыки

От издателя:

Chambers Student`s Dictionary оказывает помощь изучающим английский язык, не перегружая их избыточной и чрезмерно детализированной информацией Свыше 20 000 слов и выражений, 23 000 примеров из современного английского языка

PS
Единственный западный словарь для иностранцев, изучающих английский на среднем этапе и выше, предназначенный для расширения активного словарного запаса и в котором все примеры переведены на русский язык. ВВ

Например,

Look forward to —ждать с удовольствием, предвкушать
We are looking forward to the holidays
Мы с удовольствием ждем каникул
I am looking forward to seeing you
Я с нетерпением жду встречи с тобой

By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY

download english-russian parallel text pdf

MOSCOW — When a verse praising Stalin reappeared at a renovated Metro station in August, there was an immediate outcry.

So the director of the Metro system decided to fix things — by also restoring a verse in praise of Lenin, founder of the Soviet state.

“Stalin reared us — on loyalty to the people, / He inspired us to labor and to heroism,” words from the Soviet anthem of 1943, were joined after some overnight editing last week in the Kurskaya station’s vestibule with the line that preceded them in the anthem: “Through tempests shone on us the sun of freedom, / And the great Lenin lighted the way.”

The change makes the verse dedicated to Stalin even more visible to passengers leaving the station — and this weekend many stopped to stare at or photograph it.

Angry debate over the verses and the bumbling over their placement have highlighted the depth of confusion in Russia over the interpretation and handling of Soviet history.

The Stalin half of the verse was restored in gilt lettering for the vestibule’s grand reopening in August, after a year of renovation. The intention, Moscow Metro officials said, was to recreate the atmosphere of the station when it opened in 1950.

The verse to Stalin had been removed during the period of de-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev, while the Lenin verse had remained in place until the station closed for repair last year.

In August, when the Stalin lines reappeared, human rights activists warned of creeping re-Stalinization. The Russian Orthodox Church said monuments and quotations honoring those who killed millions were inappropriate, and even an official of the Communist Party questioned the timing, saying the Stalin verse was a tactic to lure pensioners to United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party, for city elections held on Oct. 11.

Impassioned discussions flared on blogs and Web sites — a popular arena for criticism and dissent absent from most mainstream Russian media. Now, talk is bubbling again.

Leonid Radzikhovsky, a liberal commentator, noted sardonically Friday on the radio station Ekho Moskvy that Metro officials “decided to correct Stalin with Lenin, to follow something tasty, so to speak, with something wonderful.”

Dmitri Gayev, director of the Moscow Metro, said removing Lenin was a mistake by the restorers that he had noticed as soon as the renovated station was unveiled and planned immediately to fix. He chafes at talk the Stalin verse be removed, comparing it to Stalin’s purges.

“People tell me ‘remove that quote,’” he told the newspaper Izvestia last week. “On what basis? This is the ‘Hymn of the Soviet Union.’ You’re not about to deny the existence of the Soviet Union? Remove Stalin? We went through this after 1937, when the names of the inconvenient dead were removed.”

Aleksandr Kuzmin, Moscow’s chief architect, expressed support for the restoration. “If you’ve taken on restoration, then you must restore it as the artist created it,” he said at a news conference Friday, according to the news agency RIA Novosti . “I’m not a Stalinist, but I respect the creation of those who worked before me.”

Since the Kurskaya station reopened in August, barbs have flown over another sign in Moscow. A kebab cafe called Antisovetskaya — it is opposite the Hotel Sovetskaya and had been known unofficially by that name for decades — was targeted by World War II veterans, led by Vladimir Dolgikh, who was a senior Communist official in Soviet days.

The veterans took their gripe to the Moscow city authorities, who pressured the owners to change the name to Sovetskaya.

Aleksandr Podrabinek, a former Soviet dissident who served time in a prison camp and continues to crusade as a journalist and human rights activist, criticized the move on the Web, unleashing the fury of Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth organization. Mr. Podrabinek said he had to go into hiding because of their threats.

Mr. Radzikhovsky, the Ekho Moskvy commentator, wrote on his blog that the debates over history are a symptom of Russia’s deep complexes.

“We clearly have an exaggerated interest toward our ‘sacred and accursed’ past,” he wrote. “Something like a societal Oedipus complex: so who was that mustached Father? State propaganda takes pleasure in aggravating these complexes, pushing dreams of the past instead of today’s real, live problems.”

V is an upcoming American science-fiction television series to be broadcast on ABC starting November 3, 2009.^[1][2] A reimagining of the 1983 miniseries V created by Kenneth Johnson, the new series is executive produced by The 4400 creator Scott Peters, Jace Hall, Steve Pearlman, and Jeffrey Bell.^[3] Four episodes of V will air in November 2009, and the series will resume in March 2010 after the 2010 Winter Olympics.^[4] ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson said, «We always intended to break the show up into 'pods' to make it more of an event.»^[4]

Giant spaceships appear over all major cities of the world, and Anna, the beautiful and charismatic leader of the extra-terrestrial «Visitors», claims to come in peace. As a small number of humans begin to doubt the sincerity of the seemingly benevolent Visitors, FBI counter-terrorism agent Erica Evans discovers that the aliens have spent decades infiltrating human governments and businesses, and are now in the final stages of their plan to take over the planet. Erica joins the resistance movement, which includes Ryan, a Visitor sleeper agent who wants to save humanity. However, the aliens have won favor among the people of Earth by curing a variety of diseases, and have recruited Earth's youth—including Erica's son—to serve them unknowingly as spies.<sup>[2]

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Cougar Town is an American television sitcom, which premiered on ABC on September 23, 2009. The series focuses on a recently divorced woman who reenters a dating scene filled with younger men while living with her 17-year old son^[1] and embarks on a journey to self-discovery while surrounded by fellow divorcees.^[2] The pilot episode of the show was broadcast after Modern Family on September 23, 2009, and currently airs on Wednesday nights at 9:30.^[3] On October 8, 2009, ABC officially gave the series a full-season pick-up.^[4][5]

The show was created by Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel, and is produced by Coquette Productions, in association with ABC Studios. Filming for the series takes place at Culver Studios in Culver City, California.^[6] The broadcast of the pilot episode achieved 11,28 million viewers.^[7] Critical response was mixed, with Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times stating that the show's «plot description alone could drive away male viewers»^[8] while the Los Angeles Times' Mary McNamara opined that it «is fun and exciting for women over 40.»

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Courteney Cox makes a roaring return to the TV landscape! Nice to see her back, a big yell for this raunchy sexy comedy!, 21 October 2009

Author: Danny Blankenship from Petersburg, Virginia

I for one have always thought that Courteney Cox was one of the most attractive and beautiful women working in TV. I remember her days on «Friends» and her roles in many movies where she was just so sexy. Well now I'm treated to some eye candy even though it may have aged some Cox is back in a big roaring way with a new raunchy sexy comedy called «Cougar Town». I'm really glad to see her back too she really plays her character up well.

As is so common in today's dating world with more beautiful women getting older more and more of them are dating younger men that gives them the nickname «Cougar». Set in a community in southwestern Florida Cox plays Jules Cobb a recently divorced 40 year old single mom who works in the real estate industry. Naturally she feels depressed and she starts to feel the age by seeing the wrinkles and skin drop. However she wants to keep pace with her younger friend Laurie(Busy Philipps)by going out on dates and having a good time she wants 40 to be the new 20! It's tough though as she still has to juggle life with her teenage son Travis(Dan Byrd)raising him is enough.

Yet as shown older is better so far Jules adapts nicely to hunting her prey as she seems to enjoy going in and devouring younger men. And as expected this show has plenty of sexual one liners that are funny and witty. Most important of all which is a real eye candy treat for all of us males is seeing the sexy scenes of Courteney she's still got the look as in one episode already she looked so sexy in a flowered black bra and panties.

Really this is a sitcom that's funny it pushes the envelope with it's script and the scenes are sexy as it's nice but also a little comical to watch how Jules adjust to making love like a 20 year old at 40! Plus it captures the dating scene times better as more and more older women are making younger men their conquest. I must say that even as males watch this show this is a fantasy of many to have an older woman as a lover. To close out aside from saying that the show is funny the final reason to watch aside from the sexy raunchy fun is the performance of Courteney Cox she's always been one of my favorites. She's clearly one friendly cougar who can take her claws to me anytime! Every young man viewer should yell out a roar for Courteney's «Cougar Town»!

Over eighty years since Winnie-the-Pooh first delighted readers, David Benedictus takes us back to the Hundred Acre Wood for more adventures. «Return to the Hundred Acre Wood» allows readers to spend a few more treasured hours with the Best Bear in All the World. The authorized sequel to A. A. Milne's original «Winnie-the-Pooh» stories, by David Benedictus, Illustrated by Mark Burgess in the style of the original E. H. Shepard illustrations.

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If you are a child of the Fifties, you may only just be recovering from the aberration that was the Disney version of Winnie the Pooh. The news that someone had had the audacity to write a sequel to The House at Pooh Corner by AA Milne could not be possible  or be endured!

We all have a book that dominates our reading memories. For some it is Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, Enid Blyton's The Wishing Tree, The Famous Five or Secret Seven, Reverend Awdry's Thomas the Tank Engine, and for others, Winnie the Pooh.

The Return to the Hundred Acre Wood is a sequel to The House at Pooh Corner. Christopher Robin has been away at school and has returned for further adventures.

Well, reluctantlyit has to be saidall is nearly well! The author has maintained AA Milne's style and humour. The characters have remained true to type in the intervening eighty years. Pooh is still obsessed with honey and hums; Piglet is still highly strung; Tigger still needs Ritalin, Eeyore continues his weary resignation that if things can go wrong, they will, and Owl remains an intellectual snob. A new resident of the Hundred Acre Wood is introduced in this book  Lottie the Ottie.

It is difficult to recommend an age-group for this book. It certainly is engaging for anyone in their 50s! The humour is subtle in places and there for the adult reading to the child, rather than the child. It would certainly be an advantage to have read the originals so that the style, humour and characterisation are already familiar. Some of the writing does slip into a more modern style from tome to time which jars a little and the book itself does not have that evocative musty smell of a long treasured book.

It is a gentle read that would suit bedtime perhaps better than school story time.

Emma is a four-part BBC television drama serial adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Emma, first published in 1815. The episodes were written by Sandy Welch, acclaimed writer of previous BBC costume-dramas Jane Eyre and North and South.

Filming began in April 2009 in the village of Chilham, Kent. Episode one premiered on Sunday 4 October 2009.

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практическая грамматика английского языка : справочник

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3500 английских фразеологизмов и устойчивых словосочетаний
By П. П. Литвинов
Publisher: АСТ, Астрель 2007 288 Pages
ISBN: 978—517—0455478
DJVU 8 MB

Данный словарь содержит около 3500 английских фразеологизмов и устойчивых словосочетаний. Большое количество иллюстративных примеров и тематическое разделение материала поможет в освоении новых выражений, которые позволят кратко и точно выразить свою мысль и избежать дословных переводов с русского языка на английский.


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Former leader Mikhail Gorbachev and others are outraged after last week's elections, which only 3 percent of Russians believed were fair, according to a poll.

By Fred Weir | Correspondent 10.19.09

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MOSCOW – What can one single vote, confirmed missing, tell us about the current state of democracy in Russia?

A lot, says Sergei Mitrokhin, leader of the liberal Yabloko party. He says that the lost vote in question – his own – offers startling evidence to back widespread opposition claims that regional polls held across Russia last week were stage-managed to ensure the victory of pro-Kremlin forces.

The United Russia (UR) party, which is led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, won about 80 percent of all contested positions in some 7,000 districts around the country. In the crucial center of Moscow, UR swept up 32 of the 35 city council seats.

Along with millions of other Russians, Mr. Mitrokhin went with his family to vote at their local polling station, No. 192, in Moscow’s tony Khamovniki district on election day. He knows for sure that he voted for his own party ticket.

But when the final official tally was released last weekend, it showed that zero votes for Yabloko were registered at polling station No. 192.

“We know there were massive falsifications in the vote counting, but really, not a single vote for Yabloko?” says Mitrokhin. “It’s almost as if they wanted to prove I don’t exist as a living being. It looks like the authorities are not even trying to pretend any longer that we are having real elections.”

Gorbachev: democratic system is ‘maimed’
A public opinion survey published this week by the daily Noviye Izvestia newspaper found that just 3 percent of respondents believe the elections were a fair and true democratic exercise. A third thought that UR’s victory was due to “massive falsifications” while a further 44 percent said the party benefited unduly from its command of “administrative resources,” meaning official influence, state media backing, and access to government funds.

Yabloko has documented multiple cases of what is says is official fraud, coercion, and other legal violations in the election campaign and subsequent voting, some of which has been translated and posted on the party’s English-language website (http://www.eng.yabloko.ru/).

But Mitrokhin’s outrage over what looks like the most seriously miscarried electoral exercise in Russia’s post-Soviet history has been increasingly echoed by independent commentators, including the father of Russia’s troubled democracy, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

“In the eyes of everyone, elections have turned into a mockery of the people and people have great distrust over how their votes are used,” Mr. Gorbachev told the opposition weekly Novaya Gazeta, of which he is part owner, on Monday.

“What is democracy when the people don’t participate in it?” he said. “The electoral system has been utterly maimed. We need an alternative.”

‘Everyone knows the electoral process is dirty’
Last week, scores of opposition parliamentarians staged a walkout from the State Duma to dramatize their complaints about the elections, but by Monday all but a few deputies of the Communist Party had returned.

The chairman of Russia’s official Electoral Commission, Vladimir Churov, warned the protesting lawmakers that they might be breaking the law, and added if they had doubts about the process they could challenge them by “signing an official protocol” of complaint. If that doesn’t work, he added, they can “file a lawsuit.”

Lawsuits against electoral authorities in the past have almost always been dismissed by state-dominated courts.

“Everyone knows that the electoral process is dirty, and that UR basically controls the system,” says Alexei Mukhin, director of the independent Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. “In fact, the whole world sees this, and it’s causing serious damage to the image of the country’s top leaders. The Kremlin needs to take action to change this situation,” before the next cycle of elections in just over two years time, he says.

Since Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, Russia’s political system has been forcibly reshaped to eliminate pesky opposition parties and game elections to favor the giant and reliably pro-Kremlin UR. Mr. Putin’s party now controls the vast majority of regional legislatures, most big city councils, and a more than two-thirds majority in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

That system, dubbed “managed democracy,” reached a climax last year when Putin ushered his hand-picked successor Dmitri Medvedev into the Kremlin against virtually no opposition.

Kremlin facade of democracy
The Kremlin’s efforts to create a facade that looks like genuinely contested elections – while ruthlessly eliminating serious contenders – took on almost comical dimensions in polls to choose a new mayor for Sochi, the host of the 2014 Olympic Games, where Putin has invested about $12 billion of the state’s cash and much of his own personal credibility.

In the event last March, Putin’s candidate won with a 77 percent majority, while opposition candidates and democracy activists launched futile protests over what they called heavy-handed state manipulation at every stage of the process.

But experts say the wave of regional elections carried out last week make those polls look almost fair by comparison.

“As we have seen in the past, candidates who were unwanted by the authorities were simply disqualified early in the process,” says Andrei Buzin, chairman of the Interregional Association of Voters, a grassroots monitoring group. “As before, the police were often deployed to block opposition activities and meetings. But, unlike the past, when we didn’t see direct falsifications, there was a lot of falsification in the vote counting in these elections.”

Mr. Buzin says “the situation is getting worse, subjectively and objectively, much worse.”

Former Russian deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, who faced huge obstacles in his bid to run for mayor of Sochi last April, says that this time around no candidate from his Solidarnost movement was allowed to run for city office in Moscow.

“Every single one of our candidates was disqualified, supposedly due to fraudulent signatures on their nomination forms,” says Mr. Nemtsov. Even Nemtsov’s own signature on one of the forms was declared invalid by officials, he says.

“It’s absolutely terrible, like an election in the German Democratic Republic [the former East Germany],” he says. “Forget about elections in this country. It’s just fraud, manipulation, and corruption. It’s a great big fiction.”

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