“... mystery. Her writing is so flat and cliché-ridden and undistinguished that we pay very little regard to it as we forge through the story; if those phrases of Ackroyd’s are oddly stiff it is just a matter of his creator’s regrettable insufficiency in this important department of literature. Than this, however, nothing could be further from the ...”

“... at least articulate. Lennon had turned away from verbal play into the Primal Scream therapy of Dr Arthur Janov – seen by Lennon’s public at best as a fashionable bolt-hole for the rich hysteric, and at worst as a profiteering alliance between phoney art and phoney medicine: Yoko and some quacks bleeding our John. It was an uncharitable attitude, but the ...”

“... made friends with a number of them – André de Dienes, Sam Shaw, Milton Greene – but there was little doubt among any of them that Marilyn was a self-portraitist working in collaboration. When the compositional duties fall to a painter, the result is often stunning but bereft: Marilyn isn’t there. Willem de Kooning’s 1954 oil on canvas, with its ...”

“... exposition of Bible and Talmud and its application to the contingencies of Jewish life, left little scope for anything else. Rabbinical authority banned philosophy, science and other branches of knowledge of non-Jewish origin – even, in darkest Volhynia, foreign languages. The gap between intellectual worlds is best indicated by the fact that the rare ...”

“... in Ireland after the execution of Charles I.A clear path runs from such writings to Milton’s little-read History of Moscovia and Guy Miege’s Relation of a 1663 embassy to Russia (a mission that included Marvell) because Russia was taken to be paradigmatic of the grandeur and fragility of empire. The tsar’s possessions had been growing before Henry ...”

“... wearisome evening in the theatre. I have never been bored by Osborne – well, by Bill Maitland a little, but that was meant. I often disagree with his plays but invariably find his tone of voice, however hectoring, much more sympathetic than the rage or the patronising ‘Oh dear, he’s at it again’ he still manages to provoke in an audience. (At ...”

“... means by which he kept himself and his wife and two sons in various states of grandeur or misery.Arthur Samuels Wolff was born in 1907, the only child of a well-to-do, respected middle-class Jewish doctor in Hartford, Connecticut. He was expelled from a series of first and second-rank private schools, refused by Yale and Princeton, and ended up at the ...”

“... he is chiefly remembered for helping to bring down Neville Chamberlain. When, in September 1939, Arthur Greenwood, the acting Labour leader, rose to reply to Chamberlain’s ludicrously inadequate response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, he began by saying he would speak for the Labour Party, but Amery, unable to control himself, burst out with ‘Speak ...”

“... starts off with a run-through of some of Temple’s more thought-provoking sequences: In Our Little Girl (1935) she says, ‘Maybe if I growed like a weed I could marry Daddy.’ In Captain January (1936) there is a fantasy scene in which Temple sings a love song to a man while he is dressed in baby clothes. She is dressed as a nurse and feeding him with ...”

“... furnish one of the more appropriate epitaphs: a sad, magnificent summing-up of a night city.’ A little earlier and in another paper he had called the film’s second part ‘half-baked’, and what’s interesting is that there is no real contradiction between the points of view. The movie in question is Odd Man Out (1947), reshown at this year’s ...”

“... but it’s lively, witty and draws effectively on Blum’s massive and eloquent correspondence. Arthur Goldhammer has, as usual, produced a lucid, engaging English text. Birnbaum seems to have written the book in some haste: he repeats facts and quotations, and makes a few historical slips – France was not a ‘largely peasant nation’ in 1936; Hitler ...”

“... children – and the rights of parents.    Patrick said: Do you know what I tell parents Arthur? I tell them to go and fuck themselves. Patrick held both hands up in a gesture of peace, he smiled for a moment; I’m no trying to get at you personally but I just fucking feel that you cant expect the teacher to be the everything, the heavyweight boxing ...”

“... and ‘a Trojan horse’, among other menacing epithets. ‘To call it a desk is to say too little,’ one of them explains. ‘The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always poised to offer up its back for its owner to make use of … This desk was something else ...”

“... much more convincing and exciting in stills. The speaking Newman, though charismatic, gives very little of himself. There is often a vacancy to his acting, which can give the illusion of mystery. The producer John Foreman recalled that Newman’s second wife, Joanne Woodward, once said to him: ‘If you think he’s thinking something, he’s not always ...”

“... We don’t really know what it is or what it was for. In his new study of the manuscript, Arthur Bahr embraces the mystery, spiritedly chasing after a book that will never let us catch up. He suggests that it is ‘a pedagogical compilation’, cleverly designed to provoke readers into reflecting on the limits and possibilities of meaning-making ...”