“... knot of Roman soldiers huddled together over the saddest kind of duty. A comrade-in-arms had died young, after just two years under the standards. They buried him with the honours he deserved, in his best uniform and his shining metal belt – the cingulum that was every fighting man’s pride, the sign that he was a soldier. No headstone would mark his grave ...”

“... of storytelling in this novel has to do with the death of a dog. Three characters are involved: Michael Luxton, a taciturn dairy farmer; Jack, his elder son, aged 26; and Tom, his much younger son, approaching his 18th birthday. The old sick dog, named Luke, was originally just a farm dog, then for many years Jack’s close companion, but now more recently ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... recommending simple exposition of Christian doctrine: I remember Dürer saying that when he was young he liked elaborate and very variegated pictures and that he much enjoyed looking at these qualities in his own pictures. Later, when older, he began to contemplate Nature ... and realised simplicity was the highest beauty of art. 4. Letter of 1555 ...”

“... rather than the beneficiaries of social change, by the working class rather than the thrusting young professionals. Yet in this economic twilight, not even the fortunate can afford to be sanguine about the future of civility in public places. If anxiety about crime is a displaced expression of a more general historical pessimism about the future of civic ...”

“... they have been beaten up? One of Fleur de Lys’s specialities is plastic surgery which converts young women into copies of contemporary actresses, Lana Turner, Veronica Lake and others, so that the clients can screw celebrity simulacra. What the film gives us is better than that: an appearance which is the reality. Kim Basinger looks just like Kim ...”

“... who have committed suicide – and elsewhere in the movie we see him taking calls from a desperate young man ready to do the same – and says he wants to end these needless deaths, to abolish the ubiquitous pressure towards guilt and hiding. What’s moving and powerful here is not the slightly saintly flavour of Milk’s stance – he must be as ambitious as ...”

“... who looks like a longer, leaner version of Groucho Marx, reports. He can see the novel, a young woman, can’t quite see her face. Then she moves and he sees it’s Sullavan. He tells Stewart the woman is good-looking, and resembles Sullavan – that is, Miss Novak from the shop. Stewarts gets impatient and wonders why Bressart is talking about Miss ...”

“... though we keep suspecting him we don’t suspect him for long, and we are right not to. Nick has a young mistress, his marriage was falling apart, he drinks too much, and he is still behaving in a way that doesn’t endear him to anyone, but he isn’t a murderer. Cary Grant wasn’t planning to murder Joan Fontaine either, although Hitchcock manages not to ...”

“... that almost unravels the whole saga, or at least shows how close the saga came to unravelling, the young Nelson spots what he calls a ‘suspicious-looking vessel’ off the coast of Corsica. The boat contains Bonaparte, his mother, his sister and his three brothers, although of course Nelson can’t know this. He asks his senior officer for permission to sink ...”

“... to. She decides to punish him by embarrassing him. She will wear a red dress to a ball where all young ladies are supposed to wear white. Dillard, stubborn in his way, takes her to the ball, forces her stay longer than she wants to and to dance emphatically round the floor with him, making them the only persons still moving in a shocked staring crowd. Then ...”

“... offered excuses to minor users.’ Ah yes, the war on drugs serves a noble cause, protecting the young. In the film, Anslinger says less obliquely that drugs and Black people are ‘a contamination to our civilisation’, and that ‘this jazz music is the devil’s work.’ He immediately gets more funding for the Bureau. This thread in the film is based ...”

“... tucked away in a narrow corner of time and space and class. One statue looks ‘comically’ young, ‘like a Mabel Lucie Attwell baby’. Another appears ‘beefy’, and on still another ‘the straight sag of the jowl gives a Mussolini effect.’ Many of them have slit eyes because round eyes ‘would give the coy surprise of George Robey’. The ...”

“... every contradictory aspect, that you keep forgetting what’s wrong with the writing) and a busy young intern (Evan Rachel Wood) who gets herself into all kinds of trouble. The very word ‘intern’ will give you a clue as to the kind of trouble this is, for her and for others, and the film rather clunkily underlines this suggestion – boys will be ...”

“... as humdrum history, the second time as printed farce. Canet meanwhile is having an affair with a young Vertheuil employee (Christa Théret) who wants to digitise everything. The places in the film are as restricted and repetitive as the persons. After the office and restaurant, we get living rooms where people eat and drink and quarrel, bedrooms where they ...”