“... George Stephen-applesauce. There’s a copy prominently displayed in the new books section of the White House library, and 742,000 have been shipped to bookstores to meet the demand. It’s number one on the New York Times bestseller list; North American paperback rights have been sold for $1.5 million, and Mike Nichols has bought the movie rights for another ...”

“... on human rights in the reworked US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Or Michael Posner, the founder of Human Rights First, now a business professor at NYU, who, as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour in Obama’s first term, helped bury the Goldstone Report, commissioned by the United Nations to ...”

“... to, and the maid, Emilia (Laura Betti), taking care of a few chores. All this in black and white, as if to remind us what Neorealism used to look like before Fellini got hold of it. A postman fluttering his arms like an angel’s wings – just for fun, no symbolism intended, even if his name is Angelino – delivers a telegram to the maid, who in turn ...”

“... tidy in black traditional Japanese dress. Bride cloaked in a mountainous confection of pink and white silk, topped by a hat that looks like a small but heavy monument. When she moves it’s as if a tent were shifting its ground. She kneels before her father, he says she looks wonderful. The party leaves for the wedding. The next scene shows the father ...”

“... wonderful performances in these films, starting with that of Donald Sutherland as the bad guy. White-haired, bearded, as jovial as he is sinister, he makes dictatorship look like an intelligent sadist’s dream. In Mockingjay Part I, his aides think it is time for him to have Katniss killed, because she has been visiting a hospital and stirring up ...”

“... Fell on Alabama’. ‘We lived our little drama,’ the song begins. ‘We kissed in a field of white/And stars fell on Alabama/Last night.’ There are too many ironies and undercurrents for me even to begin to list them here, but we can make a start with the face and the voice and a couple of dates: 1913 for the film, 1957 for the song ...”

“... during a screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and not, as his novel said, Haneke’s The White Ribbon. The English title of Assayas’s film underlines the method: non-fiction is what fiction becomes when you’re not very good at it. The French title, Doubles Vies, makes the same point rather differently. Echoing Marx (well, nearly), it says facts ...”

“... no threat, no grandmother in the attic, but the parents do shapeshift: at various points they are white-haired, dark-haired, crooked, straight-backed, about the same age as their son, twice his age, on their deathbeds or deep in dementia. Dad is the person who gives us the witticism about not remembering. Jake and Lucy don’t appear to notice any of these ...”

“... literally with Oscar’s afterlife, since he appears regularly to his son as a genteel ghost in a white three-piece suit, seeming to have no idea what it is a ghost is supposed to do. This is what Alexander himself says in the television version of the film (five hours rather than three): ‘I’m scared of ghosts, and you are actually dead.’ Many critics ...”

“... Neeson, who takes care of the rest of the operation. He is wearing the same clothes as she was (white blouse, plaid skirt), but is also four times her size. How did this happen? Don’t ask.In the middle of the movie we get an interesting reward for our restraint. Sig, the person we saw with the binoculars, has been arrested and is in a hospital, handcuffed ...”

“... with a Minimalist sensitivity to space – as any of the artists.In 1994 Wright made way for Michael Govan, a protégé of Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Museum. By this time, Dia had acquired nearly seven hundred works, and to show this collection needed more space than the real-estate market in Manhattan would allow. From a plane above ...”

“... animals is boring,’ the young Hansen wrote along a beam. Barefoot in summer. White bread only while they were bringing in the rye. Fishing and swimming. I recall a description of biting the heads off eels to kill them. He was obviously a born artist, who drew and painted with the juice of elderberries and beetroots and anything he could ...”

“... One may ask of Ms Ford’s book, rather as Alice asks of the White Knight’s poem: ‘What is it called?’ The title on the jacket is ‘Men’; the title on the title-page is Men. The jacket is the part of a book where publishers most candidly make known their views. Publishing contracts specifically reserve to the publisher the right to determine its appearance, unilaterally if necessary ...”

“... and I thought: Only someone who went blind recently would walk like that’; That woman wheezes white eating, and splutters at the mouth, as women do who have been living alone a long time.’ Such possible interpretations have to co-exist both with astonishingly banal acts of ‘knowingness’ on Handke’s part, and with fickle and disturbing acts of ...”

“... loathsomely ugly, wall-eyed barrel of a man who came down each morning wearing the same grey suit, white shirt and tie. Despite looking like a Protestant deacon from Alsace, he was, Huston reported, ‘heavily into the pills’, popping benzedrine to keep himself at his logorrhoeic pitch. When Huston asked for cuts Sartre moved into speed-fuelled overdrive and ...”