“... films in this list, but most of them show their age far more than Breathless does. Of course we may have forgotten a few details. Like the moment when Jean Seberg admiringly reads to Jean-Paul Belmondo a line from Faulkner’s Wild Palms: ‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.’ He replies: ‘Grief is stupid. I choose nothing.’ Or the moment ...”

“... plain colours the quilts enliven a primary tessellated geometry with patterned patches. Each patch may have its own symmetrical repeats and their position sets up (or breaks) other patterns. A further layer is added to the symmetries if the piece is also quilted – stitched to a backing through a layer of padding. In plain fabric quilts (a good part of the ...”

“... to send any soldiers. It’s better to use someone who wears civilian clothes.’ The difference may be lost on Jerusalem’s Arab residents. In the mid-1990s, UN observers reported that private guards had been involved in seizing Arab houses in East Jerusalem. Knafo insists that his company operates strictly within the law. ‘As far as I know all the ...”

“... Bourgery’s ‘Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme’ Children’s dental pain may still be alleviated by a coin substituted for a tooth under a pillow, but for adults in the early modern era the sleight of hand (and mind) required was positively baroque: my mother may have believed many dentists were ...”

“... was one of the very few places in the world in which potential immediate antecedents to Sars-CoV-2 may have been stored or used in research. The hypothesis of a laboratory leak is both circumstantial and conjectural and can probably never be confirmed, not least because if there was any incriminating evidence it would have been destroyed. In an opaque ...”

“... against coherence, and some seem to be mere wanderings into an inescapable mess. At times we may feel there is a kind of plot line around the idea of putting on a show, or politics as stealing a show, but the feeling doesn’t last long. When chariot races invaded a 21st-century New York I thought for a moment that the projectionist (if there are such ...”

“... offer Frank a cigar. He responds: ‘No, Dutch Irish.’ In the new film if you mention UCLA you may seem interested in the scenery (‘I see LA all the time!’). If you ask for ‘sparkling’ when you order a drink of water, you may get a sparkler instead. You can hear exchanges like this: ‘...”

“... the stricken village or town ... This is Gavin Ewart, who adds: If you’re accident-prones you may hear those dread tones and meet that baleful eye! There are also substantial essays on our political culture, on economic and social policy, on defence and foreign affairs. Collectively, what they propose is a new polity based upon a redefined notion of ...”

“... have the idea that we live in a world that exists independently of us and our thoughts. This idea may be called realism. Almost everyone shares it, and even those whose philosophies seemingly deny it really accept it in some form – some literary theorists, for instance, who say that we can never compare our texts to ‘the world’ but only to other ...”

“... the Prime Minister’s son, Brunei and Harrods. The story which surfaced in the Observer of 18 May 1986 was, to be frank, a bit puzzling. It was decorated with a large photograph of the Swami in beard and beads, and he certainly could not complain of the way in which he was introduced to the British public: A rich and mysterious Indian guru is emerging as ...”

“... last century were children ‘at last perceived as a separate kind of creature’. Whatever one may think of Ms Moorehead’s view of Medieval Europe – it comes just after a sentence which declares that the Black Death drove all fit people to work on the land, a view so wrong one hardly knows where to start correcting it – the tone of confidence in ...”

“... and thereby divert attention from the principal objectives of the uprisings. South African whites may ultimately regret their support for the Zulu Inkatha movement and their occasional tolerance of the activities of the black consciousness Azanian People’s Organisation. Likewise the Israelis are beginning to see the folly of having helped the increasingly ...”

“... a vast army of unlicensed women and men from making a livelihood out of treating the sick. Women may have had a near-monopoly on nursing and midwifery, but they were not confined to these areas: they could also be found, particularly in rural ‘family practices’, dispensing, bone-setting and practising minor surgery – the concept of a gender divide ...”

“... undermined the assumption that British is best. The undignified interrogation of Clarence Thomas may not have done much to enhance his personal standing or that of the institution that he now serves. But it helped to remind us that there is such a place as the United States Supreme Court, and that it seems to matter desperately to a great many people who its ...”

“... Whatever may have happened recently to the Communist regimes Eastern Europe, Marxist historiography seems alive and defiant. Lenin’s tomb may be under threat, but the historical certainties of Marxism lie undisturbed. ‘Broadly speaking,’ Peter Linebaugh tells us, ‘the English Revolution was a conflict among three social forces ...”