“... an old man in a wheelchair, seen from the back. The camera circles round him and pauses in the air close to his face – too close for any plausible human view. Martin Scorsese – this is the opening scene of his new film The Irishman – likes this kind of shot. At the beginning of The Age of Innocence (1993) the camera ...”

“... desires of other, more mystified, literary critics. Those who go in, or went in, for New Critical close reading, thriving on paradox, ambiguity and other obfuscating aspects of the bad kind of rhetoric, are accused of subtly defending political reaction. Empson (here rather selectively treated, but Norris has written a whole book about him) is excused on the ...”

“... people seemed to think him happy this could not be further from the truth. He had had something close to a breakdown in early life, and was helped by the Professor, Quiller Couch, whom he excepted from the condemnations he would in other circumstances almost inevitably have attracted. MacKillop remarks that although Leavis prided himself on his athleticism ...”

“... considerations in mind, which explains why they were more likely to grant estates and titles to close relatives or loyal servants than to hand out alms to the deserving poor. And when they spent, it was on themselves or their immediate family: on castles, palaces, pictures, high-living and conspicuous display – the essential accoutrements of ...”

“... Support’ written on the back who was lecturing a young American who had never heard of Frank Zappa: ‘I can’t believe it. What about Captain Beefheart, you must have heard of Beefheart?’ As archaeologists and others like to point out, the whole event is ‘bogus’. Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge go back at best to the midsummer fairs of ...”

“... didn’t long outlast the war, however, and by the time Lindon took it over, the Minuit was close to extinction. He had himself done exceptionally well as an adolescent member of the Resistance, and during the 1950s he did exceptionally well for a second time, by publishing books that drew attention to what the French Army was being encouraged to do in ...”

“... David Copperfield uncharacteristically: ‘O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!’ It is intensely moving, but its power is communal; each word is swollen with connection and preparation, the ...”

“... lost lives elegised in Poor. In ‘Survivor ’s Guilt, or Anikulapo’, Femi writes about his own close calls with death. Having cheated it four times, his ‘presence at funerals felt like bragging …//I am a museum of all/the ghosts I could have been.’ When he was seventeen a gun was pressed to the back of his head:The weapon jams         God ...”

“... about the Dutch women and children being rounded up and brought in by British soldiers from farms close to Ladysmith.’ There is also ‘the Biographer’, who is recording the war on a prototype cine-camera: although he remains anonymous, he must be W.K.-L. Dickson, the pioneering filmmaker – Foden’s failure to name him may have something to do with the ...”

“... burden of Banks’s plots ever since his first novel. In The Wasp Factory (1984), 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame affably narrates a life spent on a remote Scottish island, torturing animals, killing children and elaborating a grotesque private system of magical thinking, and all because as a toddler he was castrated by a bulldog. But at the novel’s ...”

“... and children. Many met their fate at his seedy World’s Fair Hotel in the suburb of Englewood, close by the entrance to Jackson Park. A self-trained pharmacist, Holmes tickled credit out of tradesmen as readily as he charmed lonely women into serial bigamy. He had already built his Englewood building when the World’s Fair was announced. He promptly ...”

“... had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother thing. Perhaps George Raft came close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as I’ve ever come ...”

“... Education: The New Crisis of Adult Authority in the Classroom’, based on the book by Frank Furedi, out that same weekend.1 ‘We’, apparently, were ‘very excited’ when ‘we’ realised Furedi’s book was being launched at the same time as the Battle of Ideas; Furedi is ‘one of the UK’s, indeed Europe’s, indeed the world’s leading ...”

“... In Howard Jacobson’s 1998 novel No More Mr Nice Guy, a newspaper columnist, Frank, is approached on the street by a female reader wanting his autograph. She is flustered by her own boldness, and to his mind she has good reason to be: he thinks that asking a strange man for a signature shows no less temerity than asking him for sex ...”

“... the manifesto itself is printed on manila paper. This visual and verbal punning puts me in mind of Frank O’Connor’s account of a picture he saw in Joyce’s Paris flat: the city of Cork in a cork frame. An instance, no doubt, of Joyce’s compulsive punning, the picture can also be viewed as the manifestation of an ambiguous attitude. The visual pun ...”