“... Its choices often seem perverse: in September 2006, Jean-Philippe Tessé passionately defended Lady in the Water, a world-class dud by the self-aggrandising Hollywood mystic M. Night Shyamalan; while the Cahiers critics’ top feature of 2002 (along with Abbas Kiarostami’s groundbreaking Ten) was Choses secrètes by Jean-Claude Brisseau, a veteran ...”

“... but we don’t have any real doubt about her sex: just about her age (she could be a little old lady or an infant), and about anything she says (her drawling jargon could give anti-elocution lessons to us all). Her smooth, moon-round face, her neat corn-rows, her slumped posture, generate an air of innocence, totally contradicted by her affectless ...”

“... as developments towards a late style – there’s even a bizarre final-act revelation involving a lady draped in ‘the hijab’, which could make sense only in a Winter’s Tale-type romance. Let’s begin, though, with a wave in the direction of some good bits. On what ageing does to the skin of the middle-class male body: As you pass the half-century, the ...”

“... dressed in a Soviet-made polka-dot shirt and a large furry coat, and was better versed in ‘The Lady with the Lapdog’ than Star Wars or The Dukes of Hazzard. Igor/Gary was soon handed over to the butchers at Coney Island Hospital to be circumcised. (Nina’s defence: ‘We were told to do it.’) Igor/Gary’s classmates hit him because they hated ...”

“... one regret in the women department,’ Trump boasts, ‘that I never had the opportunity to court Lady Diana Spencer.’ According to Selina Scott, Diana said that the huge bouquets Trump sent to Kensington Palace gave her the creeps, but Trump says that if she hadn’t been killed he’d have ‘had a shot’. If instead of his current wife, a former ...”

“... when you had to deal with the homosexual side of his nature?’ Young asked. ‘No, not really,’ Lady Spender replied. ‘No, I didn’t.’ Time was when the matter might have rested there. But there are always the children, and the children’s children. It turns out that Matthew Spender, the first of Spender’s two ankle-biters, is something of a psychic ...”

“... which added propulsion to his ambition and opportunism. First, he had histrionic acting abilities, Lady Clobery describing him as ‘fitter to make a player than a clergyman’. Second, there was the timbre of his voice, much remarked on by contemporaries, which enabled him to entrance a congregation with the deceptively sweet sound of his tirades. However ...”

“... physical touch – an experiment that John Malkovich tried as Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady (1997). Ryan’s monsters are always situated within the bounds of the probable. You can feel the depth of his achievement if you set him alongside two leading actors, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne, who bore a family resemblance to his masculine type in the ...”

“... catastrophe was that he survived.The first disaster is the condemnation of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, experienced by him as a prelude to the Great Purges, when he feared an arrest that never came. The novel’s first scene has Shostakovich hovering in the evening by the lift outside his apartment, suitcase packed, so as not to be ...”

“... pours.’ On quiet evenings they enjoyed the Benny Hill Show. By the end of their lives Lord and Lady Snow had become a half-comical duo, not at home in a new world (‘the left was going all wrong on the cultural front’) and easily parodied. It was Olivia Manning’s inspiration to call them the Snows of yesteryear, and John Bird and Eleanor Bron sent ...”

“... years and his characters, especially Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton, Mrs Frogmarch the Tory lady and Canon Fontwater, played out the range of topical problems from the Cold War to the extremes of 1960s fashion. ‘Tell me, dear child,’ Maudie asks her pelmet-wearing daughter at Ascot, ‘which particular horse did you put your skirt on?’ The white ...”

“... felt that they were farming him out to ‘kennels’. Sometimes he was looked after by a cleaning lady called Mrs Bacon, a News of the World reader who gossiped about suicide and ‘cut brown bread so thinly that its fibres had to be bonded by slabs of butter’. In the school holidays he was sent to stay with various uncles and aunts (‘Uncle Hank and Uncle ...”

“... struck up a sexual liaison with one William Alder, who was discovered by a servant in bed with Lady Portsmouth while Portsmouth himself lay by the couple’s side, apparently asleep. It was troilism with a new twist. This, too, would serve later as evidence of his lunacy. It was proper for Alder to attend his wife at night, the earl insisted, since she was ...”

“... the couch with her shoes off and returning to find her mind changed, purse in hand, and the young lady ready to go home, dammit.’ Once she was suitably inebriated, the final trap was an Osvaldo Borsani couch that flipped to horizontal at the touch of a button. Design for the Playboy townhouse (1962) In the late 1950s, newly divorced, Hefner tried to ...”

“... notice – silently insert a $20 note before instructing me to go up to the counter and ask the lady to check again. This time, the only reply was the sound of computer keys being punched, followed by the screech of a dot matrix printer. Three tickets to Murmansk were thrust into my hand. The elation of having beaten the system dissipated as soon as I ...”