“... more carnivalesque mood) in connection with ’68, whose beginnings he describes: not in May but in February, with the demonstration over Malraux’s sacking of Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque. (‘The battles with riot police were spiced with the saucy presence of Marlene Dietrich.’) However congenial and informative these two ...”

“... as well as of his ‘sordid death’. So is the mystery all about homophobia? The director Robert Aldrich thought so. ‘Jimmy Whale was the first guy who was blackballed because he refused to stay in the closet.’ Mark Gatiss has an interesting interpretation of what this means: not the flaunting of gayness but a settled homosexual relationship, the ...”

“... serious about it, with the one o’clock news. Dilworth contacted me for the first time in May. He described an artwork he wanted to undertake, a ritual for the night before Midsummer’s eve. He was going to climb a mountain on the neighbouring Isle of Lewis and trap a phial of air. This was interesting, as news of the what-are-you-up-to-these-days ...”

“... sense. There isn’t much she hasn’t read, or doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of ...”

“... to take their own cars with them. Readers eager for a feel of steamy, seamy Havana in the 1950s may feel English takes too long to get there, then skimps a little on the detail. But what he does offer provides plenty of scope for extrapolation. There was the legendary Tropicana, located in a jungle outside Havana, with its scantily clad dancers and lavish ...”

“... tradition alike (with more than a hundred pages of endnotes citing work by the likes of Tom Nairn, Robert Crawford and Brian Doyle), this is an examination of the writing produced across these islands during the crucial century between the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603 and the passage of the legislation that at last legally ...”

“... she is merely being made forceful love to by a version of Pushkin’s Charsky (now an actor, who may have a part in the blind director’s Dr Zhivago, if his penis pleases). Meanwhile the rapist is being buggered by a young thug with Aids. All this lying together gets very complicated, especially as just a few pages ago Charsky was scaling the North Face of ...”

“... back of a truck talking to a girl as the sun goes down.’ His attachment to quiet epiphanies here may strike us as a little dated: but perhaps it shouldn’t, since these are hardly period-specific pleasures. And one wouldn’t want to line up with the point-scoring American film critics of today, reviled by Wenders in the Introduction as lacking ‘modesty ...”

“... finds ‘a summer-like repose’ in accepting his fate, ‘a self-contained, irresponsible, devil-may-care indifference to the future as it looks to younger eyes; a feeling mat one’s bed is made, and no one can rest on it till it becomes necessary to go to bed forever ...’ This stoic pose is comically at odds with the histrionic player who over-reacted to ...”

“... own media-infested homes. ‘Time and space – time to be alone, space to move about – these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.’ This prediction by the naturalist Edwin Way Teale seems both prescient and poignant. We already live in a world in which time to be alone and space to move about are attainable by the rich perhaps, but a matter ...”

“... never left the drawing board. The Dyna-Soar was cancelled in 1963 by the then defence secretary, Robert McNamara. But the dream never died, lingering on in obscure budgetary allocations over ensuing decades, none of them yielding anything of practical use. Despite the bombast on both sides of what we have to call the New Cold War, current efforts will almost ...”

“... way from the marriage plot, which underwires so much literature. ‘It’s the story of life,’ Robert Sean Leonard’s character once explained on the TV show House. ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets stupid. Boy and girl live stupidly ever after.’ The Angry Young Men who were Delaney’s fellows and friends came out, sharp-nibbed, against that dispiriting ...”

“... office, came out so swiftly and in such polished form that the constitutional historian Robert Stevens has speculated that they must have been in preparation before the changes were announced. No doubt there is always an advantage to government in starting a process of consultation and reform with some of the major facts already accomplished; but if ...”

“... William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try to blackmail Nixon, as he had blackmailed other Presidents, because of the wiretap ...”

“... baptism by dipping, and low pews – ‘single and of equal height so that every person in them may be seen either kneeling or standing’.A letter the Reverend George Hickes submitted to one of the Commissioners – ‘Observations on Mr Vanbruggs Proposals about building the new churches’ – gives a good idea of the kind of ecclesiastical advice they ...”