“... 1938, Hahn wrote a letter to Meitner reporting this puzzling result. She and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, who later became professor of what the local Cambridge paper called Unclear Physics, realised that the uranium nucleus had split in two with the release of a prodigious amount of energy, and first coined the term ‘nuclear fission’. In April ...”

“... he sat through the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta, Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité and seven films by Robert Bresson. It was the summer I learned the word ‘austere’.My taste, or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, ‘when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any ...”

“... David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows the degree to which personal identity depends on both. Three hundred years after Williams lived, it ...”

“... of Joan of Arc came into focus, the depressive national mood was countered, for my childhood self, by a vision of gallantry under pressure, of a young woman’s heroism. The convent itself stood on the rue Edith Cavell, named after another heroine of the same selfless, courageous mould: Cavell (born 1865) worked as a nurse, a teacher and a spy in Belgium ...”

“... would often delay the shooting of a scene because he wanted to discuss every element in detail (Robert Redford, who played the Sundance Kid, just wanted to hurry up and finish). ‘Then what Paul would do with the scene would have no relationship to what we’d been talking about for the last half-hour.’ He put far more agony and effort into his ...”

“... O’Neill lamented his lack of a great language adequate to his tragic subject: ‘By way of self-consolation, I don’t think, from the evidence of all that is being written today, that great language is possible for anyone living in the discordant, broken, faithless rhythm of our time.’ ‘Our time’ is perhaps not just the 20th century, but the ...”

“... publication of the series and people’s reactions to it, and so it takes place on a higher, more self-conscious level, so to speak. It also recapitulates some of the material in the earlier books, particularly the father’s death in Book 1. Actually, if you want to begin here with Six, maybe you ought to read Book 1 first.Q. Is this fiction or ...”

“... with a grudge, melting into the crowd. There have been plenty of incidents – George Wallace or Robert Kennedy – like that. Taiwan is in its way a highly politicised society, in which partisan passions run deeper than in older and more jaded democracies, and the immediate effect of the magical missile has been to polarise public opinion more than ever ...”

“... been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And she gave us handouts of Heinrich von Kleist’s inexhaustibly spiralling ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, photocopied from the TLS. I studied with Gillian for a year, we corresponded and met up sometimes in the 1990s, but I ...”

“... under way in Britain, with contributions by Yorkshire Television, Lords Devlin and Scarman, and Robert Kee. Irish public opinion, provincial to the last, finally fell in behind its UK counterpart. What is most unexpected about the Hill and Conlon books, perhaps, is the intensity of their descriptions of prison life. Innocence may sharpen the memory: at all ...”

“... Morton Fullerton, whom she had met through James, strangely led to The Reef of 1912, the self-consciously tragic novel in which she comes closest to late James. Here the involved multi-character social chronicle temporarily gives way to a story of sexual susceptibility and betrayal mostly set in a country house and taking place between four main ...”

“... and its unique freshness. Wilson, it should be said, is always making judgments: scepticism and self-irony are not part of his repertoire. He did write poems, plays and novels, but they have always seemed to me neither as interesting nor as satisfying as his essays and historical studies. His own imagination simply does not soar, nor his insight pierce ...”

“... precious to uncork. McGann turns the tables on the common judgment that Morris’s books were too self-conscious to be readable (‘beautiful but dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti stone’ in the punning words of Robert Carlton Brown, a maker of what on the evidence of McGann’s examples must be handmade ...”

“... his ‘universe henceforth without master’, and the hero of these poems. The breach between the self and the world is the problem: ‘How to live without being torn between these infinities?’ Popa asked in one of the few short notes he wrote on poetry. What interests him is the dignity and heroic forbearance of the Everyman-Sisyphus figure pushing his ...”

“... The attempt to wall Davis off in this way from some ‘real’ LA to which he does not belong is self-discrediting, as is the associated fantasy that insecure Angelenos have embraced Ecology of Fear to smear their city and curry favour with the New York establishment. It is also true, as Davis and his defenders point out, that no scholar’s footnotes could ...”