“... course desperation is funny too, if you tell it right. The Coen Brothers’ new movie, A Serious Man, contains several jokes of this kind, and is such a joke itself. It doesn’t get funny until you start thinking about how ineptly unfunny it is. The ineptness of the genre is captured with disturbing conviction, and makes you wonder how the Coens can have ...”

“... and short spacing pieces (dwangs) define interior and exterior walls and offer a complete X-ray of the structure – like a model made of matchsticks – before the cladding of boards or sheet material dresses it in a not always expected style.Timber frame-houses are light: you can move them about – people quite often do. In a lot to the north of the ...”

“... occupational hazards. Not long before I retired my wife and I were woken up at around 1 a.m. by a man hammering on our front door. It seems that on his way home from the pub he decided he urgently needed to talk to his MP. I didn’t open the door. He was eventually removed by the police. On several occasions, also late at night, a ...”

“... hall, leave our country … I don’t want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man. I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man … We should send them all back.’ Among those troubled by Clapton’s remarks was the photographer David (‘Red’) Saunders. A great bear of a ...”

“... was, one might add, the most unchanging thing about poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who not only went on expecting to be ...”

“... A man has been mistaken for somebody else. He has been kidnapped, forced to drink a bottle of bourbon and sent off to meet his death in a stolen car. He survives, and decides it is time to get things straight. He bribes his way into the hotel room of the man he is supposed to be ...”

“... echoes a famous line from the earlier film. ‘I always wanted to be rich,’ he says. What Ray Liotta always wanted to be was a gangster. And of course DiCaprio is a gangster, and this is a gangster movie. The old trope has just slithered from New Jersey to downtown Manhattan. Gangsters in the movies – I have no doubt that in real life they pursue ...”

“... songs and recordings, and to favourite singers, some fictional and some historical, such as Ray Charles or Sarah Vaughan. Much of the action takes place at night, or in darkness. A more substantial recurrent theme is that of threatened or collapsing marriages or relationships, some of which are sad and some heartlessly funny. Much of the pleasure of the ...”

“... and Nigerians? Not because of where they come from, but because they are playing for Arsenal or Man U, is the simple answer.To un-fans, the grief and joy outpoured on triumph and disaster seem crazed and disproportionate. For fans, Hillsborough and Heysel are tragedies that move them more than memories of legendary military disasters. To un-fans, they are ...”

“... to the first volume of his biography of Russell, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, Ray Monk was clear, as his title indicated, about the story he had to tell, though also daunted by the amount of material he had to work with. The bibliography of Russell’s work lists more than three thousand publications, and this doesn’t include the letters ...”

“... of fashion, heels and veils’) hit the same sweetly rasping note as Tish Murtha’s unemployed man and his family in Newcastle, Martin Parr’s empty, rained-on tables for a Jubilee street party, Tony Ray-Jones’s group on deckchairs making the best of a cold day on Brighton Beach, Homer Sykes’s naked girls in a ...”

“... the inmate’s outgoing telephone call, six of their charges, five convicted IRA terrorists and a man with a previous record of armed prison escape, made last-minute preparations for their departure from custody. Three of the convicts wore double sets of clothing, well prepared for a long night ahead, on the run in the bleak countryside. Somewhere between the ...”

“... his ability to govern. His only remaining political asset, the belief that he is a decent, honest man of some moral courage, is being remorselessly eroded by his conduct of the campaign. Reagan’s puppeteers, meanwhile, may be wrong to wrap him in cotton wool. He can weave oratorical magic in front of disenchanted ‘Middle Americans’. There is ...”

“... history. One of the most fascinating connections he reveals is between Johnson and the sociologist Ray Pahl, who carried out fieldwork on Sheppey’s informal economy in the 1970s. Pahl was attracted by its paradoxically close-at-hand remoteness from the mainland, and by its self-contained island status. In a book full of echoes and doublings, ...”

“... the place where the desperate alighted was hardly Cockaigne. It was more likely the Isle of Man, whose low-rent hotels and boarding houses fulfilled their drear destiny as improvised internment camps for the fortunate among the wretched.One way to survive was through internal exile. Thirty years after the war, Christian Schad, so forgotten that he had ...”