“... all its questions in delicately indirect ways. When Mank, played by Gary Oldman, first meets the young English woman (Lily Collins) who will type the script at his dictation, she politely says: ‘How do you do?’ He replies: ‘Well, that’s a big question.’ Asked if he knew William Randolph Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, he says yes – ‘if ...”

“... to jail, but time shifts constantly, and these shifts usually aren’t flagged. She looks very young, then she is almost middle-aged; she has straight hair, then it is curly. She speaks modestly and penitently in public; and then in front of a different audience she is like a rock star, expertly performing her grief. She looks after the children; we see ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”