Right now, there is a girl, somewhere trapped in a brothel, crying herself to sleep again, and maybe daring to imagine that some day, just maybe, she might be treated not like a piece of property, but as a human being.

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Mr. Hitchens's memoir covers deeply personal, occasionally embarrassing territory, including his one night stand with Mr. Amis's late sister Sally and the pair's botched attempt to "research" a brothel scene for Mr. Amis's novel "Money" at a seedy New York massage parlor.

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The business plan has to include working hours, conditions and prices related with the rent of brothel windows which seems to be one of the causes of problems because the prostitutes are forced into long working days to cover the high costs.

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Born in 1915, Piaf (Marion Cotillard) was raised in a brothel, a travelling circus, and the bars and streets of Paris, where she developed the voice somehow both metallic and throaty, coarse and soulful that electrified the French and, after the war, the Americans, too.

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It took several years for the virus to break out of Congo's dense and sparsely populated jungles but, once it did, it marched with rebel armies through the continent's numerous war zones, rode with truckers from one rest-stop brothel to the next, and eventually flew, perhaps with an air steward, to America, where it was discovered in the early 1980s.

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