“... 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 ...”

“... bringing a telephone out of doors. Important messages would be carried on salvers by Cantonese in white jackets, in the wake of the trays of all-important drinks. A young woman walked, stately, with a flowered parasol, while colonels told about typhoons and a golden spaniel gasped beneath a chair.’Many of the characters’ names are words, so that one ...”

“... sense of mission. The Great American Novel may be either a rumour or an expression (like the Great White Whale), but the Great East German Novel was definitely a Project. Something that would square honesty and hope, ideology and life. A top-down product that contrived to appear bottom-up. Aesthetics was political, was social, was almost medical. One can see ...”

“... and cold and on a rooftop across from me the legendary water towers of New York City, the giant white smoke Miltoning to heaven.Doesn’t sound so wrong after all. But then what about Norma Desmond? And is she wrong because of what she is saying or because she is the person who says it? She could be pronouncing any of her lines in Sunset Boulevard, of ...”

“... the extraordinary sums of money involved,1 were quickly followed by the prosecution in Britain of Michael Collier. Chairman of Morgan Grenfell, the largest securities firm in the City of London, for making an instantaneous profit of £15,000 on the purchase of shares in a company he knew was about to be taken over. A steady series of cases involving ...”

“... place from which bad things have tended to come, invasions and rabies and so forth. Dover presents white cliffs rather than a Statue of Liberty. So protected, the English have remained relatively inviolate, the most settled and exclusive of peoples, enjoying the baffling and specialised condition known as Englishness, a thing at once glorious and unserious and ...”

“... was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in 2023, of cardiac arrest caused by complications from weight-loss surgery, she had been recording tapes of material for a memoir. These recordings form the basis of From ...”

“... any case make another movie after this one: The Lavender Hill Mob, for example, or The Man in the White Suit, both released in 1951? It’s not that the deaths don’t work at the level of narrative, or that Guinness’s renderings of the various D’Ascoynes – at one point they appear together at a funeral – are all the same. The difference he brings to ...”

“... with ball-bearings is illegal, while Israel’s reliance on cluster bombs, fuel-air explosives, white phosphorus (as a weapon rather than for illumination) and depleted uranium is immoral and quite possibly also illegal. Finally, there’s the death of the four UN observers, struck by a precision-guided bomb in a highly visible, long-established post ...”

“... made when everyone else had turned to sound. Have I mentioned that the whole thing is in black and white? The Artist is not a silent film, though, and not a reconstruction of one. It is a silenced film, in which almost all noise except the off-story music has been suppressed. We don’t hear people speak within the film, and we don’t hear any noises around ...”

“... kids as the kids are to the black boys. How are they going to pick the teams? Black versus white, one of the children says. That’s out of the question, Murray says, and selects the mixed teams himself. What the film as a whole suggests in its easy-going but also melancholy way is that ethnic divisions in America may be forms of imprisonment, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tells her it’s time to go back to sleep. She does, having paused only to chat with her black and white guinea pig, which she keeps in a cage close to her bed; just a little girl, just a moment of childhood. In the next scene the three girls are having their hair brushed and being told they must kiss their father before they do anything else. This is worrying ...”

“... black enclave in that area. In the film it’s not an enclave, it’s a world, and there are no white people in it. The real silence begins, though, when we see a small boy on the run from some other kids who are bullying him. He manages to get into an empty house and lock the door behind him. His pursuers shout and bang on the walls, throw rocks, and then ...”

“... play of that name because ‘there weren’t any Blacks at that time.’ In Saint Omer, a white professor expresses surprise that a philosophy student from Dakar should be interested in Wittgenstein rather than a subject ‘closer to her culture’. Danton’s Death offers a remarkable (temporary) solution to racial problems of this kind. Steve brings ...”