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“... suggests both the magical power of Hollywood, and its less than democratic creative constitution. Robert Ray’s A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema: 1930-1980 (its title playing on a controversial 1954 piece about the French cinema by François Truffaut in Cahiers du Cinéma) is the work of an intelligent American lover of American films engaging ...”

“... can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing it,’ Akira Kurosawa said about Satyajit Ray’s first film, Pather Panchali (The Song of the Little Road), and it’s true: this movie, made for next to nothing, mostly with untrained actors, by a director who was learning (and making up) the rules as he went along, is a work of such lyrical and ...”

“... bigger and more significant revolution than punk: this is a wholesale reappraisal of pop music. As Robert Ray writes, in his illuminating essay in Present Tense: ‘Sampling and sequencing, go the current complaints, make musicians unnecessary ... we can detect here the historical complaint against every new technology and every avant-garde movement that ...”

“... crab. I, pink flower mantis. I, swallowtail. I, prairie dog. I, locust. I, capercailzie. I, manta ray. I, rattlesnake. I, sycamore. I, manatee. I, honeybee. I, saddleback. I, lamprey. I, coelocanth. I, okapi. I, salmon. I, snapper. I, fire. I, anolis lizard. I, orchid. I, tree ...”

“... Ray Strachey​ is remembered, if at all, for The Cause, her history of the women’s movement, published in 1928. But reading that book – which is dedicated to Strachey’s friend and mentor Millicent Garrett Fawcett – you wouldn’t know that its writer played a major role in the events described at the end, when an ‘almost religious fervour … sent young ladies to street corners to demand the vote’, and to pledge ‘their whole lives to the Cause ...”

“... heartland of the global American imperium. Except for Jane and Paul Bowles in Morocco, only Robert Stone and Joan Didion suggest themselves, and neither of them is associated closely with any one setting. On the whole, American writers seem convinced that the vital features of their society are most clearly discernible at its centre, even though it is ...”

“... project to Franklin, who, unlike the rest of the unit’s staff, was experienced in the use of X-ray crystallography (albeit on amorphous substances), but he hadn’t reckoned with the personal repercussions of his decision. In other respects the outcome was very successful. Within a year, Franklin and Gosling had established the existence of two ...”

“... it mean for a romance to take the shape of a murder investigation? In a Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray’s elegantly bitter film about damaged trust, throws that question at its viewers. If all love stories are inquiries of one kind or another, the movie seems to suggest, perhaps they differ only in their relative violence. When filming began, ...”

“... For example: Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, James Wong Howe, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, John Garfield, Charlie Chaplin and Leo McCarey all attended a reception in July 1943 for the Soviet director and administrator Mikhail Kalatozov. At that time Russian and American propaganda methods dovetailed nicely, and everyone seemed to approve ...”

“... into either ‘left-hand-drive’ or ‘made in Japan’. It wasn’t like that in the days when Ray Monk ran the philosophy section of Waterstone’s on the Charing Cross Road. At the time, Monk was also writing his Life of Wittgenstein; these days he doesn’t need to work in a bookshop. Not so Robert Topping, for 12 ...”

“... them, As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour Had made them certain earth returned their love. Robert Frost If anything is safe to love, it is the jellyfish, Aurelia aurita, that pink and silver moon-cloud, drifting wild in every harbour from the South Atlantic to the Bay of Reykjavik; or Hippocampus, monstrous to the Greeks, though shaped like ...”

“... out Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion for praise, but he would have done well to explain why it is Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow who provides the emotional anchor. ‘That “Over the Rainbow”,’ Rushdie writes, ‘came close to being cut out of the movie is well known, and proof positive that Hollywood makes its masterpieces by accident, because it simply does ...”

“... Sprinklings of pseudo-Hebrew here and there added to the mystique. When the former army chaplain Robert Bacon visited the ‘Shakers’ God’, John Robins, in London in around 1650, he found Robins sitting on a bed before his disciples speaking in tongues: ‘But the words he spake I did not understand, only they seemed to me to be a mixture of Latin, and ...”

“... his American heroes – including not only Lubitsch, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles, but also Robert, Aldrich, Frank Tashlin, Robert Wise and Nicholas Ray. Characteristically, his best remarks about them home in on technique. ‘Hitchcock’s mastery of the are grows greater with each ...”

“... toward sex but from the European assumption (found lingering in the work of Americans like Robert Altman) that the scent of documentary can and should be allowed to flavour a fictional method.’ Lane is thinking of American cinema as Hollywood. But there is a strong tradition of American documentary, from ...”