“... as being ‘unaccustomed to unusual happenings’. When one of the devil’s assistants says to a young woman that he has been sent to see her ‘regarding a certain small matter’, she understands him immediately, albeit wrongly. Obviously he has come to arrest her. What a relief when she learns that he hasn’t; better the devil than the secret police. Not ...”

“... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...”

“... this year, these men had repeatedly been making sexual assaults of the most extreme sort on very young members of their families, sometimes in a spirit of revolting cruelty. One man had raped his sobbing five-year-old daughter, as she was held down by her mother, and buggered his three-year-old son. The other two had indecently assaulted and buggered ...”

“... taste for ‘rough trade’. The picture shows Wittgenstein walking down the street with a young man wearing a black raincoat. It was originally published in Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten, edited by Michael Nedo and Michele Ranchetti, with the caption: Wittgenstein mit dem Freund Ben Richards in ...”

“... to all of the University’s High Anglicans. ‘You must believe in God,’ Jowett told the young Margot Tennant, ‘in spite of what the clergy tell you.’ The effects of Biblical criticism and scientific advances on the household of faith take a deal of disentangling. Some leading Late Victorians sought in social work the motivating force which they ...”

“... in the sand. Is this another Leviathan? The real Leviathan, dead and wasted, a sort of memorial? A young boy goes out to sit with the skeleton when he is upset. The place is the coast of the Barents Sea, not far from Murmansk, but every scene except the last is set in summer, so the cold is not the point. Nor is there any real sense of closeness to ...”

“... to get into the James Bond market, also true that French mainstream cinema did all kinds of things young filmmakers didn’t like – that’s what the New Wave was about. Still, even if a homage to the past is quite different from raiding it, the near-simultaneity of the two is interesting. Judex was a silent serial Louis Feuillade had made in 1916 – after ...”

“... Murray does have to work to get other clients, and his prize is Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), a young Hasidic widow who needs to escape from her stultifying life and the eager attentions of Dovi (Liev Schreiber), a Brooklyn community safety officer with earlocks and a patrol car. Murray inventively casts Fioravante as a masseur, and the resulting intimacy ...”

“... the normal world – but who wants to live there?’ He takes men and women he describes as ‘young, hungry and stupid’ and turns them into a howling, irresistible sales force, persuading investors to buy lousy stock the traders can dump once they have made a packet from the brief, illusory booms. DiCaprio describes the job as ‘selling garbage to ...”

“... work to set up house inside some forgotten foyer. At one point she films a protest march, many young people carrying signs urgently calling out for change. Varda herself suddenly appears on the sidelines, a little old lady, as she calls herself, also carrying a placard. It says ‘J’ai mal partout’ – ‘I hurt everywhere.’ This phrase also has a ...”

“... learned of them when he read a magazine during a visit to a dentist, although of course he was too young to have conceived of his exploit then, and the towers were still just a project. At an early point in the film we see a shot of what looks like Ground Zero, cranes and excavators at work in a deep hole in the earth. But it isn’t a picture of Ground ...”

“... back ‘in the Old Country’. ‘I forget which one exactly,’ he says. A memory flash shows a young Grampa on a boat where everyone has an Irish accent mixed with something that might be Polish. But the subtlest and funniest joke in the episode, the one that best sums up all the hypocrisy thriving then and now on the subject of immigration and therefore ...”

“... among its impeccable olde London costumes and sets – as if it were looking for a slot between Young Sherlock Holmes and My Fair Lady – it has an edge which is entirely contemporary in two senses. It belongs to the actual life of the men in question, not their legacy, and it speaks to concerns of the 21st century, where science looks more like magic ...”

“... like happy families, are alike? Not quite that perhaps, but the last shot of the film is of the young Chiron sitting on the beach, his back towards us, looking out at the ocean. He sees the moon, and then he turns his head. His wide eyes suggest all the desolation and promise that Juan saw in him at the beginning. If we started again, would things be ...”

“... and more especially the part that they play in American mythologies of success. In Whiplash a young musician at a top (imaginary) New York conservatory wants to be the best drummer in the world, to be a legend or nothing. He despises all other forms of life, and finds his match in his ferocious teacher, played with extraordinary relish by ...”