“... bars and dances, the ambassador looking despondent in Paris, the vast German actor Heinrich George en famille, with dog. In self-portraits, he stylised himself as an industrialist or banker, in formal Western rig of dinner jacket and cigar, aloof and unmistakable. Still, Alfred Döblin, seeing a photograph of an unidentified Beckmann, judged him to be a ...”

“... democracy of madness is his theme: David Hume and his breakdown, as described to the physician George Cheyne; and from Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, the story of the idiot boy, who spent the summer eating bees, his only earthly occupation. Porter takes his cue from Burton’s Anatomy: although madness takes certain forms, all streets in ...”

“... only about Penelope. It is called ‘The World as Meditation’ and has an epigraph in French from George Enesco, saying that his meditation, ‘the essential exercise of the composer’, was uninterrupted, ‘a permanent dream’. Penelope is the thought that precedes and underlies composition; meditation is Penelope waiting for a man who does and does not ...”

“... Lorenz Hart and Marianne Moore in the same lineup; who like poems that could be set to music by George Gershwin or Kurt Weill, brittle and easy, wearing their sadness lightly, unafraid of the obvious. ‘We may never ever meet again/On the bumpy road to love’; ‘Oh it’s a long long while/From May to December ... ’ Louis Untermeyer, in an enthusiastic ...”

“... returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind the Balfour ...”

“... Juan Antonio Bardem, Berthold Bartosch, Laszlo Benedek, Jean Benoit-Lévy, Luis Garcia Berlanga, Michael Cacoyannis, Renato Castellani, André Cayatte, Costi Costa-Gavras, Vittorio De Seta (director of Banditi a Orgosolo), Thorold Dickinson, Julien Duvivier, Pietro Germi, Anatole Litvak, Jean Painlevé, Gillo Pontecorvo, Nicholas Roeg, ...”

“... with a Minimalist sensitivity to space – as any of the artists.In 1994 Wright made way for Michael Govan, a protégé of Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Museum. By this time, Dia had acquired nearly seven hundred works, and to show this collection needed more space than the real-estate market in Manhattan would allow. From a plane above ...”

“... what in this context might ‘metaphoric’ mean? There can be no doubt, at least initially, about George Turner’s gripping and mordant The Sea and Summer, certainly his best book so far. It is set very much in a Science Fiction landscape, that of the ‘drowned world’ of the middle future, where the abandoned tower blocks of Melbourne stick up out of the ...”

“... have said, Gertrude c’est moi): but at least it was alive, as Stewart is alive in Myself and Michael Innes. Exposing herself to the latest critical viruses, for she has always been sedulous in keeping up, Mary perhaps decided when composing hers that she did not exist as an individual after all? At least both books share the most engaging ...”

“... invested in the War Loan, to protect their finances against any postwar Labour government. As Michael Smith describes, these problems were exacerbated by the budget cuts which followed the end of hostilities. In 1919, MI5’s annual grant dropped from £100,000 to £30,000, forcing it into unsavoury alliances with the political Right. It recruited Maxwell ...”

“... house in Stanmore Hill inhabited by Freda Sawle, a youngish widow, and her children Hubert, George and Daphne. Writing in the third person, with each chapter tied to one character’s point of view, Hollinghurst stages a weekend visit from Cecil, who’s at Cambridge with George and has arranged for him to join the ...”

“... them. It must also mean constant expectations and pressures that have constantly to be resisted. Michael Longley has acknowledged that a poet ‘would be inhuman if he did not respond to tragic events in his own community, and a poor artist if he did not seek to endorse that response imaginatively’ – and if the latter part of that sentence means ‘if he ...”

“... to John Wayne. Anticipating the question (asked by a black reporter at the first debate with George Bush) that would cost Michael Dukakis – an opponent of the death penalty – the 1988 Presidential election, John Wayne once said of Ethan Edwards: ‘he was no villain ... The Indians fucked his wife. What would you ...”

“... is doomed. Whatever else the novel does, it doesn’t show the lesbian life as recommendable. Michael Baker has taken on the task of relating The Well to John’s own life. ‘It is arguable,’ he writes, ‘that had John drawn more on her own personal knowledge, a better novel would have resulted.’ But she would have had, of course, to romanticise ...”

“... by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was him: he had the darkest eyes I’d ever seen. His hair was slick, combed up to a glistening ridge; the lips were thin, the ...”