“... 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 ...”

“... at him wildly, and Monk quickly switches into proper tough-guy talk. Cut to an image of the white publisher in a New York office, much relieved after being much startled. Meanwhile, on a separate track we know is not going to remain separate for long, Monk agrees to become a judge for a prestigious literary prize. He keeps refusing the invitation until ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... This is a miniature dictionary of the invented English in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon’s charming, flawed and exhausting new novel: bik (Yiddish: bull) – doorman latke (Yiddish: potato cake) – 1. police cap 2. policeman noz (Yiddish: nose) – policeman shammes (Yiddish: assistant to rabbi, beadle) – policeman sholem (Yiddish: peace) – gun shoyfer (Yiddish: horn) – cell phone shtarker (Yiddish: strong man, strong arm) – gangster; hard man Yiddish, it turns out, has not said its last word: it is still involved in the business of coinages and slippages ...”

“... it would not have found itself condemned for hypocrisy and inaction and bypassed by the black and white radicalism of Selma. For when the Civil Rights movement came in the Sixties, white liberals joined the struggle too late to be credible. The campaigns to desegregate lunch counters, buses, universities and schools had ...”

“... There’s a home movie, it seems, of the author in infancy, a sessile toddler, ‘huge and white on the just-turned plot./An early grinning vegetable/sprung up overnight, feeding/methodically, in fistfuls’ – she is doing what it says in the title. With grave charm, Solie worries ‘at the wisdom/of this documentary, its complicity/in my vice, where ...”

“... or wrote but never finished, with fantastic, phantom, harpooning titles like In Ballast to the White Sea, La Mordida, Swinging the Maelstrom. All these things – books, changed circumstances, surgery – are cures of one sort or another, for as Stephen Spender remarked in his introduction to Under the Volcano, ‘with Lowry one is never far away from the ...”

“... shock takes several other forms as well: what we might call the invention of race by 18th-century white American Christians, who one day decided to segregate their formerly unsegregated churches; racial slurs and allegations flung about during the plague; the murder of a mixed-race couple in the Pennsylvania countryside; and across the sea in South ...”

“... land of transplanted urban dream kingdoms, a paradise for poets who do not wish to be disturbed. Michael Viney’s documentary, The Corner of the Eye, opens with a slow sweep across this landscape, a picture of distances fringed with purple and a few tawny cows nosing through the foreground, then switches to a little ...”

“... Dymaxion car, a paramecium-shaped tricycle with a Ford V8 engine. Beside it, a black and white video showed the Dymaxion car slinking past a row of box-like Depression-era Fords and sidling with UFO-like ease into a parking space its own exact size. Fuller intended to add what he called ‘jet stilts’ to the vehicle someday, so it could fly, but ...”

“... English Department at the Bath Academy of Art, he appeared in his own play for children wearing white tights and with gold sequins on his upper eyelids, right into middle age. Swinburne had a sympathetic line or two for androgynes: Love stands upon thy left hand and thy right,   Yet by no sunset and by no moonrise   Shall make thee man and ease a ...”

“... I had her otherworldly ear.I attended to the Greek boys diving for their crossas a girl released a white dove from the shrineof her consecrated palms. We watched it disappear.If Callas preferred to perform sans lenses,leaving the concert hall a gold-vermilion blur,was it to shield her conscience from the world,so that she moved and sang in fictive ...”

“... pathetic you were in cheesecloth he’d green shades I could scream still the Society of Jesus White Fathers it’s invisible as that day the same day she and me we made a heavy pretence of love I mean we’d a drunken fuck in the afternoon after a dockland lunch the Land of Green Ginger its smell of sex herrings desire             ‘Sure ...”

“... for clemency awaited his decision. Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering charges. They were doomed to ...”

“... as they gallop into an isolated alpine monastery: ‘Put these on and sing.’ ‘These’ are the white habits of a monk and a rosary each. The list of stars in the film (Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, all the others mentioned elsewhere in this piece) is a clue to what we are watching. They are all themselves, bringing with them the ...”