“... in film and legend for bravado, wept and pleaded. Farooq and the crew were not much moved. On 1 May, the Chinese informed Alan Chan, the ship’s owner in Singapore, that the Petro Ranger was safe. The crew remained in Chinese custody until 28 May, when they were allowed to leave. The Chinese confiscated what remained of ...”

“... would be anti-Conservative committee-rooms, as happened in the Vale of Glamorgan by-election in May; that Arthur Scargill would be seeking to become a fully-owned subsidiary of Ron Todd? Yet all this has come to pass, and so has industrial action by academics. That is, for me, the saddest development of all. Fashions ...”

“... he regularly voiced was that at the house we rented in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1963 he had saved David Frost from drowning. In later years I saw him quite seldom, though if he’d seen something you’d done on television he’d generally telephone, ostensibly to congratulate you but actually to congratulate you on having got away with it yet ...”

“... was. Lots of things are different here, I’ve learned since I arrived from New York last May. You don’t tip as much, and I often bump my head getting on the tube. In London, I’m told, fact-checking’s not much done: the facts are the burden of the reporter. But at the LRB we do check facts, which are for the most part conveniently located in the ...”

“... character sings in The Threepenny Opera. His hypocrisy is unmistakable, but the ironic implication may also be right. We don’t all want to be human, even if it’s possible. We have other ambitions. Still, the relevant characters in the singer’s world and in ours are human in the standard, technical sense, even if some are fictional. What happens when ...”

“... of the early 1920s. Price levels in January 1946 were more than five trillion times those of May 1941. The exchange rate for the gold sovereign in the autumn of 1944, shortly after the liberation, stood at 170 trillion drachmas. By that time, Davis’s pile of notes would scarcely have been enough to buy a loaf of bread. Commentators on the current ...”

“... seen in galleries. They are as proper a place for them as the theatre is for plays. Religious art may give one pause – even non-believers can feel that an object of veneration, an altarpiece say, loses something when put in a cool well-lit place, but on the whole art stands up to the museum pretty well. For many modern painters the museum was the space they ...”

“... appearance of television in the world of cinema; a nifty cultural joke and an act of memory. You may remember that a treasured artefact in the episode called ‘Twenty-Two Short Films about Springfield’ (1996) was a photograph of Sean Connery signed by Roger Moore. At one point in the big-screen film the action stops abruptly and the words ‘To be ...”

“... It grows up to six centimetres long, has a brown or white shell and a speckled body that may range in colour from grey to orange. In sheltered bays, these molluscs settle into fine, soft mud or muddy sand, where they mate in undulant chains, half a dozen at once. When disturbed from their orgies, the snails swim away using two broad fins or ...”

“... after a visit to the Exposition Universelle, he expressed enthusiasm for British painting – for David Wilkie, Charles Robert Leslie and Francis Grant – and noted that the archaisms of the Pre-Raphaelites (the ‘école sèche’) had not inhibited their response to life and sentiment: he cited the Order of Release by Millais as something beyond the ...”

“... The mall is divided into two distinct levels, a result of the building’s complicated history. It may look like a single symmetrical mass of brick, but it’s really two buildings, one from the 1920s and the other from the 1950s, concrete-framed and clad. For the first time, members of the public can now see inside, and the difference between the two ...”

“... first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to ...”

“... someone else back and that’s what neither of them was good at.28 March. Another death, this time David Storey whom I liked and found sympathetic, though I might run into him only occasionally and most often in M&S. It was always cheering, even if these days he was often shuffling as much from the medicines he was taking as from old age. But he would call me ...”

“... mixture of political activism and technical experiment, the Pollock brothers joined his May Day workshop. Pollock was distancing himself from Benton. Some time in the late Thirties he began to frequent John Graham, that most mysterious of all the gurus of European Modernism. Graham took him up, reinforcing his faith in unconscious imagery. From now ...”

“... in itself ... the political press lost its bearings, its justification and whatever efficacy it may have had.’ Today there is political journalism without party, which Koss compares to ‘Christianity without dogma’. Under the old party managers who created the political press, a journalist was expected to share the views of his employer, but there was ...”