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“... Carré has now published 23 books, the Great Bear of that night sky being the series of novels lit by the round English gentleman, spymaster George Smiley, he who wipes his glasses with the thick end of his unfailing tie. Among the features of these spy stories is a concern with patriotism and uncertainty, not least with the uncertainties of patriotism. There ...”

“... 20 January) consists mainly of handsomely illustrated, alphabetically arranged entries by a number of commentators. The longest take up a few pages, the shortest a few lines. Many draw on her own writings, published and unpublished. As a result the critical generalities which are normally segregated in introductory essays are mixed with the kind of ...”

“... plenty of blood to look at, and a longer glimpse of Peter Fonda’s entrails than most people will be eager to have (he’s a bounty hunter who’s been shot during the robbery of a coach). In the fantasy style required of current cinema, his body, open entrails notwithstanding, shows no sign of human vulnerability: as soon as the bullet is removed he is ...”

“... saloon. If we’ve judged well and missed the worst of the traffic out of New York City, we will be doing 65 in the middle lane. Even so there’ll be a steady stream of vehicles passing us to left and right, many of them SUVs (sports utility vehicles), the truck-based four-wheel-drive giants that rule America’s ...”

“... watching them maybe. They are just a typical cartoon family, amazed or stupefied, drugged anyway, by the programmed antics of humans. Or they are watching their own world’s version of The Simpsons, an endlessly recurring comic dream of what their compatriots imagine a family, a town and a country to be. Whatever they are ...”

“... for such an operation and that ‘special conditions were in place’ for an imminent attack. By ‘special conditions’, of course, he meant the public desire for revenge following the deaths of 13 soldiers in Gaza in the space of 48 hours. It was a convenient opportunity to start a war. But he also meant that sooner or later the Jewish settlements ...”

“... everything that is clever and interesting in it comes from a very good novel of the same title by Christopher Priest, but the two works feel completely different. The novel stretches over several lifetimes, from the 1860s to the 1990s, and goes to some lengths to develop both its period flavour and the strangeness of the continuity of old hatreds. ‘What ...”

“... two sisters who have different styles of reading. Ludmilla reads for pleasure, unencumbered by academic-literary-critical goggles, delighting in writers who write as ‘a pumpkin plant produces pumpkins’. Lotaria, on the other hand, is an academic who reads books ‘only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them’. (‘You ...”

“... of Etienne-Jules Marey and Lucien Bull, and the popular adventures of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough. In another light Painlevé is a photographic modernist, attending to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street. On ...”

“... their petulant squabbling and bouts of throwing each other off high buildings, they are joined by Wonder Woman in a battle against a creature from another world. ‘From my world’, as Superman says with a mixture of pride and associative guilt – the creature is a cyber version of King Kong made of kryptonite. The new ally is tidy and resolute, looks ...”

“... drapery (sometimes Hujar just photographed the fabric), his portrait sitters can resemble figures by Nadar or Julia Margaret Cameron. Some of them were famous – William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, John Giorno – or soon to be: Hujar recorded successive generations of downtown scenesters, including Gary Indiana, Fran Lebowitz ...”

“... The volumes​ of the Buildings of England series initiated by Nikolaus Pevsner unsurprisingly confine themselves to buildings and their settings, but it’s tempting to be distracted by what you already know about a place, about Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, for instance, the latest county to have its volume revised and expanded by Yale ...”

“... a portrait painter, but he devoted most of his career to the painting of murals. There will never be a satisfactory exhibition of his work, but to appreciate his achievements is not difficult since the greatest of these murals are in Parisian churches.Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, designed by Jacques Ignace Hittorff, is a ...”

“... ideas ranged from a theme park to a picturesque ruin garden – but the one finally chosen was by the Argentinian architect Rafael Viñoly, best known in this country for the unloved Fenchurch Street ‘Walkie-Talkie’.* His plan was to make the redevelopment of the power station economically ‘viable’ by surrounding ...”

“... when she thinks of her father, a French Canadian who fought against the English and was executed by them. This and later moments in the film are dated by the start and end of the American Civil War (1861-65), when the girl is a grown-up. The adult Vivienne is wonderfully played by Vicky ...”