“... letters’ in an antique shop in Arezzo. Whether 19th-century or 21st, the tale has echoes of Robert Browning’s discovery in Florence in June 1860, at the market in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, of a collection of documents relating to a Roman murder case from 1698. ‘The old yellow book’, as Browning came to refer to it, formed the basis of his ...”

“... of vision’. They remind us we’re watching a ‘mediated form of seeing’.The self-referentiality of A Matter of Life and Death anticipates The Red Shoes, with its reflection on the process (and the psychological cost) of making art and cinema. Like its predecessor, the film has two contrasting modes of representation. A fantasy ballet ...”

“... speaker writes home to his mother about his brother’s arrest. Poetry satisfied the ‘need for self-expression at a formative period of my life’. But politics came with it: Johnson joined the British Black Panther Party while still at school, and was introduced to Black consciousness literature for the first time: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black ...”

“... shaman Harry Smith, is arcane, but the critical world has been primed for its reappearance. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good and Greil Marcus’s The Invisible Republic – recent accounts of the curious development of American folk music – both devote considerable space to the Smith collection, making impressive claims on its ...”

“... attributed to Hobbes, will be dismayed to find it re-attributed to one of his closest friends, Robert Payne. Another tract, of considerable importance as it has generally been taken to be Hobbes’s first major work of philosophy, the ‘Short Tract on First Principles’, has also recently been re-attributed to Payne, correctly in Malcolm’s ...”

“... is early slang for “homosexual”, and “man of all trades”, in a gay context, self-explanatory.’ (She does not cite the delightful, if apocryphal, story of the woman who had a crush on the handsome and multi-talented Bernstein and replied, on being told that he was gay: ‘Is there nothing that that man can’t do?’) She goes on to ...”

“... does get a little chilly in the long run, and Ulrich, like his creator, has a strange capacity for self-satisfaction alongside his gift for self-criticism. But the writing never stops being funny and illuminating, and we’d be lost if we had to approve of writers in order to keep reading them. Ulrich is a fully developed ...”

“... on a Train (1951) to Marnie (1964) – the period many regard as the peak of his career – Robert Burks served as cinematographer, George Tomasini as editor, and Bernard Herrmann as composer. The deaths of Burks and Tomasini and the falling out with Herrmann must, as Auiler suggests, have had something to do with the director’s subsequent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... held it to be the prime cause of death, yet Evans-Pritchard could find no evidence of any ‘self-conscious’ witches among them. The question ‘Were there people who believed themselves to be witches?’ has thus long been excluded from consideration. But it seems that this self-denying ordinance is becoming ...”

“... even for a mega-rich guy. Newhouse wanted both respectability and profitability, and turned to Robert Gottlieb, editor-in-chief at Knopf (US publisher of Nobrow, for those keeping score), as the man to make this cocktail swirl. In a retrospect that is easy but exact, Seabrook sees Gottlieb as a transitional figure with a compromise strategy – to use ...”

“... children and sell the paintings off the walls in amorous pursuit of first, the then undergraduate Robert Kee and second, the egomaniacal and usually drunken Dylan Thomas. Even thirty years later, Taylor recalled this period as ‘a decade of intense, almost indescribable misery’, and it is impossible to contemplate the blighted hopes and bewildered children ...”

“... She was influenced by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations with the occult. In 1885 she attended a meeting of the ...”

“... of socialist realism. Then came news of the Stalin trials and purges. Exercising a great deal of self-deception, some Surrealists, including Aragon, remained party members. Most of the others left; the proud Breton was further alienated when he was refused a speaking slot at the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in 1935. A chief ...”