“... Dowland and Purcell, with a small debt to odd contemporaries like Kevin Ayers, Syd Barrett, Robert Wyatt.In​ Germany in the mid-1970s, Eno hung out with the Cologne experimentalists Can and collaborated with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (aka Cluster, aka Harmonia). Not long after Another Green World was released he was in Germany and ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain ...”

“... could have changed his sensibility, but, despite contact and correspondence with the likes of Robert Lowell, he remained a visitor, too busy to look beyond the clichés. Writing to David Hammond from Salt Lake City airport in 1987, he notes the snowcapped Rockies and the big open sky of the West but says that this ‘domain of magnificent romance’ has ...”

“... life was a curious mind and an imagination always playing with possibility, but above all his craft and his career, the sense of film as an art and a discipline, a kind of experiment in which even the wildest jokes took on a certain aspect of rigour or purity.I met Buñuel in July 1978, through an old friend, Santiago Genovés, a Mexican ...”

“... gather from his letters to them – or to close English friends like Charles Milnes Gaskell, Sir Robert Cuncliffe and Cecil Spring Rice – that the gamut of writers he casually and aptly quoted or alluded to seriously engaged him. Not one letter contains an extended passage on a literary work. His test for a storyteller, a ‘trivial sort of animal’, was ...”

“... strayed in from Excellent Women in order to make this observation. In developing her novelist’s craft in the 1950s, and in working for Africa, Barbara Pyrm was exposed to prevailing ideas of what social anthropology was about. Of these, perhaps the dominant fashion, and certainly the one that seems most clearly reflected in her novels, is functionalism. In ...”

“... to promote himself as a ‘character’. He was disciplined in his work, minutely devoted to his craft. What he wrote of himself in Paris applies equally well to the early life of his son Constant: ‘I joined the religious few whose ritual stated very clearly that it was not the one achievement, not the one egg, the one talent that mattered two whoops in ...”

“... so the sums get tricky. Late last year, just after the 40th anniversary of Sputnik 1 – the first craft into space – the US and European Space Agencies launched the Cassini-Huygens mission to the planet Saturn. Cassini is the size of a 30-seater bus, and it is heading away from Earth at 67,800 mph. It has already travelled more than 120 million miles, but ...”

“... way from the marriage plot, which underwires so much literature. ‘It’s the story of life,’ Robert Sean Leonard’s character once explained on the TV show House. ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets stupid. Boy and girl live stupidly ever after.’ The Angry Young Men who were Delaney’s fellows and friends came out, sharp-nibbed, against that dispiriting ...”

“... of Silence, the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton quotes the Nobel Prizewinning bacteriologist Robert Koch’s prophetic remark, made in 1905, that ‘the day will come when man will have to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague.’ ‘There is likely no place on earth untouched by modern noise,’ he goes on. Even far from paved roads in ...”

“... novels began to be rediscovered in the 1970s. While researching his screenplay for Chinatown, Robert Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned ...”

“... would often delay the shooting of a scene because he wanted to discuss every element in detail (Robert Redford, who played the Sundance Kid, just wanted to hurry up and finish). ‘Then what Paul would do with the scene would have no relationship to what we’d been talking about for the last half-hour.’ He put far more agony and effort into his ...”

“... underwritten by the strength of its commitments, its declaration of cultural independence. Indeed, craft and conviction are mutually protective. As Kenneth Clarke wrote in Landscape into Art (1949), the ‘less an artefact interests our eye as imitation, the more it must delight our eye as pattern, and an art of symbols always evolves an art of ...”

“... in The Citizen Kane Book), which argues the case for Mankiewicz’s authorship, but on Robert Carringer’s The Making of Citizen Kane (1984), which takes the question of collaboration further still and stresses the decisive influence of financial, legal and other contingencies. When told the thesis of Carringer’s book, Welles responded ...”

“... on Mingulay to sell on at Greenock and elsewhere. They still went fowling in the 1880s, when the craft had died out among the Mingulay folk, and roped down the first few hundred feet of those colossal bird-cliffs, the black groins of them streaked orange and green like tribal body make-up or Aboriginal cave paintings of dancing ‘demons’, to catch fulmars ...”