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“... of biography. The key figures are Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato, Alfred Beit, J.B. Robinson, Solly Joel and Julius Wernher. None has a definitive biography, and on someone such as Beit there is an almost complete silence. This is even more true of the minor figures, such as Rhodes’s henchman Rutherfoord Harris, his partner Charles Rudd, or even Leander Starr ...”

“... was 18 years old.’ Later in the day, Houston encounters a ‘crew-cut man in his forties with a white towel hitched under his belly and a cigarette clamped between his front teeth’. This is Colonel Sands, a messianic CIA officer and veteran of the Second World War, who drinks too much and takes an unusual and obsessive interest in the tunnels that ...”

“... of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become. At least his models were alive. Circumstance has ...”

“... partly a matter of form. Like Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar created square, black and white images, typically using a Rolleiflex or the more sophisticated Hasselblad, plus tripod. The geometry of the square encourages a photographer to centre the subject and face it head on, turning unruly bodies and irregular scenes into fixed primary shapes. But ...”

“... end, even if it is doing so amidst great suffering. But the writing in A Land Apart is largely by white writers and, especially that translated from Afrikaans, is almost entirely pervaded by a deep sense of dread. The preface speaks of this mood in Afrikaans fiction as ‘an intimation of apocalypse, which implies not just the death of the individual or the ...”

“... enterprise on the largest scale, put together by a committee chaired by William Feaver. Modernist white walls mask the emphatic textures and shapes of the interior of the shell, so that Fifties Brutalism encloses Thirties Modern. But what is displayed in the cases and on the walls is an attempt at total recall. A huge range of objects is thrown together ...”

“... What​ was it like growing up in black and white?’ was a question I asked my mother once. Until that moment her memories of childhood, so much more engrossing than any bedtime story, had unspooled in my head in perfect greyscale. (They do still, in childish defiance of the facts.) It wasn’t as if I’d seen many photographs of her as a girl – I still haven’t – but simply that the past, as I had perceived it, was defined by an absence of colour ...”

“... a sublime and desolate night or two away from it all. We come much closer to the hangings; the two white men among the condemned get to make speeches, while the Indian just has a black sack pulled unceremoniously over his face. And above all we have Jeff Bridges in place of John Wayne. The two men don’t look all that different: shabby and decaying and ...”

“... so obvious what the characters are thinking that they might as well be shouting. As in the Billy Joel song they are sharing a drink they call loneliness but it’s better than drinking alone. The first person we see in the film talks a bit but we learn far more from what we see of him and around him. He’s a drug dealer checking in with one of his boys on ...”

“... the most popular movie and, after the Bible, the best-selling book of all time, is a monument to white supremacy. The book and film offer different variations on the theme: the David O. Selznick production replaced Mitchell’s celebration of the Ku-Klux-Klan with a visually unforgettable paean to ‘the cavalier society’ of antebellum Atlanta, with its ...”

“... of wine!’ In one of his scrolls envisioning Hell where the divine allowed him to delve, in Joel, son of Pethuel, (he added, the pedant, 1.12!) he found a quotation that made his day and he tried to use to mar mine how pomegranates would wither away and shrivelled grapes hang from the vine. He tried to convince me but didn’t succeed as I spiked out ...”

“... million. The little boy in the film, Cole Sear (played with audience-beguiling depth by Haley Joel Osment), sees dead people who don’t know they’re dead, and when the film came out it was not merely a success on every front, but, like every success of that sort, caused people to see it as establishing a new genre, the emotional supernatural ...”

“... too, must surely be ‘by Preston Sturges’. Who else?Enter our hero, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), acclaimed director of hit comedies and musicals, who’s about to tell the studio bosses that he’s done with the motley mountebank malarkey. He wants instead to make a film of a grittily realist social protest novel titled O Brother, Where Art ...”