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“... death), the seriousness and the sitter’s sober prosperity do not. When modern caricaturists like David Levine put pulled-about faces on small bodies their drawings project a more distinct personality than is found in their source material – usually paintings and photographs. The characterless little heads and drawn-out bodies of fashion plates do the ...”

“... combined The Great Dictator with Pulp Fiction and shifted the scene to France? One answer might be Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds, but it’s not a great answer because the film itself is so many things. Of the identifiable movies within its fanciful confines, one is rather good, another is so bad you have to like it and the third is ...”

“... many additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions are detailed in a wonderful new book by Vivien Igoe, The Real People of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (University College Dublin Press, £32), but let’s first pay a visit to The People v. O.J. Simpson, a show that reminded me – as if I needed reminding – that real life is the poor, lost cousin of ...”

“... interestingly, she was also evoking a whole school of New York writers, for whom Mankiewicz could be made to stand representative: a set of wisecracking, worldly figures supposedly attracted to Hollywood by the prospect of copious easy money, who created not a genre of film, but rather a style that prepared the way for ...”

“... as it does in Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Though the obvious does occasionally have to be explained. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part II, ‘if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ It’s an accident, of course, that another Corleone is played by Robert De Niro, the ...”

“... Death, Roni Horn’s retrospective at Museum Ludwig in Cologne (until 11 August), you’re flanked by 96 photographs of her niece Georgia. The two grids of 48 seem to match until you’ve swivelled back and forth a few times and started noting certain fine disparities. Georgia’s grin slips, her head tilts, she peers at us through different holes in the slice ...”

“... Herszage), out on the town with her friends, is stopped, frisked and almost arrested by the police. Still, the film hangs on to its jollity for quite a while. We leave the beach – the Paiva family lives just across the road – to continue partying in a house. And then other houses. It’s all samba and bossa nova and the memories of rock ...”

“... from, and in a sense complementary to, American Sublime, another celebration of wilderness, which David Craig wrote about in the last issue of the LRB.Fulton has made many walks of many kinds in many places over the last thirty years. But because a walk must exist in the present, and take place elsewhere, all he has to offer in the gallery are wall ...”

“... or swanky golfing parties in Shanghai hotels. It was the title of a dance festival, compered by People’s Liberation Army choreographers, ‘offered’ to the Communist Party in celebration of its 80th anniversary in 2001. It would be too easy to see this exhibition, which has obtained from the Palace Museum in ...”

“... she worked as a secretary to support them both (he had a small trust fund). When he was hired by Louisiana State University, Cleanth Brooks telegraphed on behalf of the Southern Review: ‘PLEASE ADVISE BY WESTERN UNION IF MRS LOWELL KNOWS SHORTHAND.’ At home, she had to retype his poems every time he changed a ...”

“... its cues from Rousseau and Freud to urge ‘frankness as never before’: autobiography should be the scene of revelation, a public confessional, an equivalent, in book form, of the newspaper exposé that ‘tells all’. But all can never be told: one can never escape one’s life, one’s language, one’s cultural ...”

“... on the night train from Liverpool and listening to the wheels beating out the rhythm: ‘It could be me, it could be me, it could be me.’ It was a delightful conceit, wholly in tune with Beaverbrook’s injunction to his journalists to tell the story, whatever it might ...”

“... These tales of mob and gang will be appreciated by man and boy, but especially by those of us who have survived fifty-odd years of life in Britain. Our day-school years in the Thirties were much influenced by the public school system, expressed in schoolmasters’ aspirations and schoolboys’ comics ...”

“... The past is there to be made use of, and everyone makes use of it in his own way. Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson invent alternative Englands where radical social experiments were nipped in the bud by the entrenched forces of reaction, while T.S. Eliot’s successors imagine devout cavaliers preserving a unified sensibility in economic and spiritual matters ...”

“... Service – have recently acquired new bosses who have publicly declared that the Nineties will be a decade of major change. This has set me wondering what kind of reaction George Carey might expect if the plans he had in mind for his own organisation were at all like those being implemented under William Waldegrave. Capitation fees and evangelism budgets ...”