“... movie’s travellers get some food and spend a piece of the night. An old man lives there, and a young girl, who provokes most of the speculation about beauty and danger. Again, the building is an outpost against the dark. Seen from outside, light leaks out under the door, round the sides of the curtains. But not ordinary light from rural Turkey, more like ...”

“... was only four years away. But what was so modern about the Rossellini film, and why did it seem so young? The answer, I think, has to do with the refusal of the apparently inevitable melodrama – how could there be a journey without change or redemption? – and again, with the transposition of Hollywood actors into a world that has left them stranded. The ...”

“... what else she is – principally an uninformed child in an adult body. This is not a metaphor. The young woman we saw committing suicide in the opening frames of the film is Bella. She died but was not beyond resurrection once Dr Baxter took up the body. He discovered that Bella was pregnant and decided to go beyond ordinary rescue of one or the other of the ...”

“... of them knows how to drive. But the work is dominated by the almost unbroken mood of the three young men, who yell at each other and everyone else. It’s not that they are actually angry. Or rather, they may be but we don’t know that. What is clear is that they don’t believe they are alive unless they look and sound tough. There’s a good example of ...”

“... books, spreads of photos, scatterings of manuscripts. At one point a glamorous photo of the young Riefenstahl morphs into one of her when she is slightly older, followed by another in which she is older still, until we find we have seen a whole life in a set of faces. Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101. Horst Kettner, her partner of many ...”

“... to get some official acknowledgment of what happened. In his memoir Marcelo Rubens Paiva, a young child at this point in the story (and played by Guilherme Silveira in the film), says: ‘I don’t know the exact date on which she discovered the truth. That was when she stopped smiling for many years.’A quarter of a century later Eunice receives, from ...”

“... Fortunately, before she left Georgia, she acquired the companion I mentioned – an orphaned young man whose main job in life so far has been to annoy the violent, conservative older brother he lives with. Istanbul changes him too. He becomes a caring aide to Lia, who, consistent with her own development, stops telling him to shut up and actually talks ...”

“... as villains. The star of London Weekend Television’s new Once a thief? is 22-year-old Michael Baillie, who began his criminal career as a burglar at the age of eight, and served his first borstal sentence at the age of 15. According to the Sunday Times, he originally wanted to play football for Aston Villa, but now he’s thinking of taking acting ...”

“... Journalistic ethos was overstrained in Cooke’s case, for her infant addict didn’t exist. The young journalist got caught, the paper was humiliated, but the only element in the tale that was brand new was the level of mea culpa that seemed to invigorate all the participants. In recent times, this level of regret has become somewhat operatic, and this ...”

“... of her fellow detectives, who fail to recognise that the victim ‘had once been a beautiful young woman with her whole future in front of her’. But where else would her future be? Another minor technical innovation has seen the development in 2013 of soundless gas guns (one used by our killer), about which Jake is oddly ignorant. With the aid of an ...”

“... The narrator looks at a photo left there, and thinks it may represent ‘one of the other dead young men’. A few pages later, recalling his seemingly interminable early sexual adventures, he says: ‘I suppose most of them are dead now, all those young bodies I touched and undressed and tucked in when they fell ...”

“... of Craig being funny brings to mind the monster doing ‘Putting on the Ritz’ in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, and he isn’t funny in Skyfall. But he does make a grim gag now and again – returning from his supposed grave he says he has been ‘enjoying death’ – he is less righteous, he is damaged, and he thinks. He is – what do you call ...”

“... despise. When she finds out that Aveling, whose wife has by now died, has secretly married a young actress, she obtains poison from a chemist with his connivance and kills herself. This is a novel of unobtrusive skill, a shrewd imaginative reconstruction. Judith Chernaik deploys a variety of narrative techniques but assimilates them almost unnoticeably ...”

“... to his boy. ‘Dick!’ ‘I have come to sit with you for a bit, father.’ (It is the gay, young, careless voice.) Dick turns out to be a sensible and good-humoured phantom, recommending brisk activity as a remedy for grief. He advises his father to take up painting again – ‘your picture of those three Graces’ – and not give up his ...”

“... Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So Good. Of the new milk bars, for ...”