“... set of shadows. She is wearing an overcoat, walking the streets, looking troubled. This must be a film noir; the only real questions are where the corpse is, and what she has to do with it. None of these details is accidental or unimportant for the film we are watching, and the effect is memorable, but half of our inferences are wrong. This is Lana ...”

“... on Marxists, who allegedly believe in historical determinism. Take this latest instalment, edited by Andrew Roberts, who has himself contributed an essay on the bright prospects that would have faced Russia in the 20th century had Lenin been shot on arriving at the Finland Station. One of Roberts’s arguments in favour of this kind of history is that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... taste’. During that time he made the pictures for which he is now famous: shepherds and flocks by moonlight, bright clouds, foaming blossom, cornfields heavy with a dream of late summer. None of the Shoreham pictures was shown, sold, or even known to more than a few people in his lifetime (although it’s possible that some of the group of six sepia pen ...”

“... When Frederic Church’s lost painting ‘The Icebergs’ was found to be in the possession of a school in England, newspapers here had to explain that Church was a 19th-century American painter. The picture made 2½ million dollars at auction in New York: a reminder that provincial values – in a number of senses of those words – can still surprise ...”

“... This is a valuable account, written by a first-hand reporter, of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s tour with Coriolanus, directed by Terry Hands, to Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Munich and Zurich. The company were known to Europe from previous visits, but it was a bold adventure, the bolder for the play chosen ...”

“... between ‘Useless Man’, a dirge from Bowery’s trash art noise band Minty, and a rendition of David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’. What might Bowery have identified with in the latter song? I ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair? Or something to do with salacious self-mythology? Sordid details following …He was born in 1961 and grew up in ...”

“... on top of the Mount of Olives you walk down past Gethsemane to the city, taking the road used by Jesus: what other could he have used? This brings you near the Golden Gate, by which Messiah must enter: it is blocked off, and the Muslims have craftily established a graveyard in front of it, so that no priest can ...”

“... restaurant, I think on Goodge Street, with Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, the meeting arranged by John Bassett, whose idea it was that we should all work together writing the review that turned into Beyond the Fringe. Having already written while still an undergraduate a large slice of the two West End shows Pieces of Eight and One Over the Eight, Peter ...”

“... turned down on four occasions for the post of director of the National Gallery. He was thought to be too closely associated with the trade (‘little better than a dealer’), and was known to have operated with scant respect for officialdom when employed by the South Kensington museum. In addition, his taste deviated too ...”

“... see the planting she’s done here in London in front of houses in any hill town in Tuscany. Cheek by jowl, each in a piece of land not more than twenty feet by forty, are wilderness, cultivated informality and disciplined horticulture. All make pictures, two by intention, one through ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”