“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... referred to themselves as the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets. The work of this group was always wrapped in self-justifying, crudely fashioned, post-structuralist commentary, and emphasised indeterminism, resistance to figuration, narrative, subject-matter, verbal music, imagery or any pleasure that might be associated with poetry, pleasure which they believed pandered ...”

“... declared, quoting Pasternak. Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in ...”

“... very occasional use of the phrase ‘invisible hand’ – the now well-worn metaphor for the self-regulating capacity of the free market – was playful rather than integral to his message. The co-architect of New Labour, Gordon Brown, went a few steps further, attempting to rehabilitate Smith, not without some plausibility, as a proponent of ‘the ...”

“... most notoriously violent moment. The period has been much written about in the forty years since Robert Conquest made the Soviet 1930s synonymous with the Great Terror. Scholarship on prewar Stalinism has bifurcated. On the one hand, studies of the Terror have become more detailed and nuanced. Now that the Soviet archives have been opened, it seems that the ...”

“... responded when she saw the plans. Over eight pages she dismissed the scheme as an alienating, self-consciously futuristic ‘Flash Gordon job’. She begged her father to build something instead that ‘expresses the best of the society in which you live, and at the same time your hopes for the betterment of this society’.Bronfman, keen to have his ...”

“... a gentle landscape of lawns and sparkling streams, and yet its freedom is ‘fictitious’. ‘Self-dependent lordlings’ have been able to engross power and make laws that suit their own interests at the expense of the country as a whole, and have at the same time convinced the meanest peasant that he too is free: Pride in their port, defiance in their ...”

“... foreign clerics were only too pleased to work inside the royal fold, where their distinction was self-evident. It also gave grounds for the aggrandising notion that philosophers supplied kings with wisdom – as Aristotle had Alexander.The​ second half of the 15th century was dominated by Ripley, the canon of an Augustinian priory in Yorkshire, whose ...”

“... Abraham Lincoln​ , memorialised as a child of the frontier, self-made man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by events he could not control ...”

“... in wilful collective hallucination, the abbey and its visitors mostly ignore them. As Robert Musil said, writing before BLM, ‘there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.’ The abbey’s audio guide – the English version is mellifluously narrated by Jeremy Irons – mentions them only in brief asides about Poets’ Corner and a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pit bulls, twin heads wobbling in the window. Gold chains, leather hats: pumped to the limits of self-parody, the bosses in their glitzed company limo look like snuff-film extras. The wretched Alsatian slinks off to sniff at cigarette packets and to pee on a few steps. In the old days, apparently, around 1985, the drugs were carried inside the collars of the ...”