“... spectral landscape. The Mariner’s journey to the edge of the Antarctic, a land of ‘mist and snow’ where ‘ice, mast-high, came floating by,/As green as emerald,’ finds several echoes in Encounters at the End of the World (2007), his Oscar-nominated documentary about the ‘dreamers and scientists’ employed at the US Antarctic Programme’s ...”

“... we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills. The cab is old and draughty, it’s beginning to snow and as we drive through this landscape of lost villages and frostbitten fields it gets more and more foggy and like a journey out of Le Grand Meaulnes. It’s all of an hour before we reach the church and everyone has gone in, the undertakers with a ...”

“... in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... Province in China. Schaller’s principles and practices inspired Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. He is a big-game biologist, a student of spectacular individuals in nature rather than a toiler at the overlooked and the unindividuated: ‘An animal must provide an emotional experience if I am to involve myself in its world for years.’ Yet ...”

“... knew the name Sheila – which had an easy diminutive, Shaylochka – because they had read C.P. Snow.) It was impossible to live in the Soviet Union as a foreigner and not become obsessed with spying. (If anyone doubts this, read Michael Frayn’s wonderful novel The Russian Interpreter, published the year I first went to ...”

“... marker of power, and he deals in the sort of belligerent, accusatory, semi-comedic liberalism that Michael Moore has turned into a cult that nets hundreds of millions of dollars.2 Delegates at the Convention were much keener to meet Moore than they were to meet Howard Dean, who had led the field among the candidates for the nomination until he found himself ...”

“... at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite imposing, with the box-office generally at the ...”

“... the 1920s, about a hundred years too late. Now and then, or was it once, she went skittering over snow and ice in a cold place called Chamonix, definitely near London. Yet in the unfolding of this family origin myth, with its puzzles and enigmas, my own provenance and Maureen’s background were endowed with a fantastic, deceptive clarity. Adoption was the ...”

“... great British stability, and infused by a changing but always recognisable British identity. When Michael Powell in A Canterbury Tale had shown a hawk rising from a pilgrim’s hand and turning into a Spitfire, it had seemed natural. When English Electric developed the RAF’s new jet interceptor, the Lightning – tested by Roly Beamont – it had seemed to ...”

“... Isadora Duncan, Alla Nazimova, Pola Negri, Tamara Karsavina, Katharine Cornell, Marie Laurencin, Michael Strange and Eva Le Gallienne in the 1920s and 1930s to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hope Williams, Libby Holman, Ona Munson (Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind), Poppy Kirk (a Schiaparelli model and prominent diplomat’s wife) and many others in ...”

“... the Olympic charter. Barcelona’s triumph was not its new pedestrian squares, but the presence of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and the rest of the US basketball ‘dream team’.What was Olympism without amateurism? Samaranch attempted to fill the ideological void by bringing the IOC into line with the emerging concerns of international politics in the ...”

“... produced’. In an essay called ‘Mythical Work’, one of Joyce’s collaborators, Michael Sonenscher, looks at the compagnonnages of 18th-century France. Journeymen in various trades practised a non-Christian ceremony of initiation into a devoir. The men concerned had overlapping skills concerned with building, furniture, leather. ‘The ...”

“... in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the first syllable rhyming with ‘snow’ rather than ‘shoe’ or ‘cow’). Whatever it took. One of the things Trynka’s biography makes clear is Bowie’s utter determination to hit the big time. ‘I was ambitious in my head,’ his schoolfriend George Underwood told Trynka, ‘but not ...”

“... the figure of the male poet, became visible was the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in 1955. Michael McClure, the youngest participant that night, recalled earlier performances by Gerd Stern ‘with belly dancers and bongo drums’. Ginsberg, who had moved from New York to Berkeley, launched Howl. But just as significant, McClure felt, was Snyder’s ...”

“... two of the most knowledgeable observers of the way the war is being fought, Franz-Stefan Gady and Michael Kofman, point out that the amount of ammunition Ukraine needs varies radically according to whether its army is defending or attacking. They estimate that it requires as many as a quarter of a million shells a month for an offensive, and at least 75,000 a ...”