“... holy? I would like to put this woman and her cells in a story, but what kind of story would it be? What kind of epiphany would grace her ordinary afternoons? My-sister-the-doctor says that what I heard was a reference to the HeLa cell line – a popular choice with medical researchers. They are, disgustingly enough, the cells of a woman’s cancer. What is ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... Israel’s biggest strategic threats looked like a very bad idea. I could not have believed that by the end of the day I would have rather had open-heart surgery than listen to any further analysis of the Middle East. Inside the taxi I reopened the conference kit that had been emailed to me. It was the first time I had been to the event, but as an Israeli I ...”

“... to Birtwistle. It was, perhaps, in political history that historians first recognised their job to be something like interpreting the past in its own terms, warning themselves against the tendency to award points to past actors insofar as their thinking anticipated the present. What Herbert Butterfield in 1931 called ‘the Whig interpretation of ...”

“... Stock Exchange, she in the World Trade Center, north tower, 83rd Floor. Both are ciphers, spun by the formal games and architectural spaces and personal circles they move in. The book begins in an airplane, destination unknown, as the passengers watch the in-flight movie about revolutionary terrorists massacring a group of rich golfers and ...”

“... the United States and Australia – anthropological film-making has been primarily supported by academic institutions or government agencies. By a provocative coincidence, both the origins of modern anthropology and the birth of cinema can be traced to the last decade of the 19th ...”

“... Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini is an extended obeisance performed by a young Englishman before some marble panels in an Italian church. The panels were carved in the 1450s, mostly by a Florentine called Agostino di Duccio, who was working in Rimini for the local warlord. Three dozen illustrations punctuate Stokes’s reissued text of 1934 ...”

“... unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche.’ This thought-provoking assertion captures a truth about the shift from the modern to the postmodern: there is something pastiche-like about a great many contemporary writers, not least those who write in a personal voice which is in itself ...”

“... only tractors, bikes and horse-drawn vehicles). Its central, fertile plateau is protected by cliffs on almost all sides that rise to over three hundred feet. There are no natural harbours. In 1862, the lords of the Admiralty of the world’s greatest naval power came to inspect its defences but sailed away, finding nowhere suitable to ...”

“... drawn into the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and inclusiveness stirred up by the 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which covered 1500 years of work in Latin, Norman French, Gaelic and English. Les Murray’s New Oxford Book of Australian Verse and Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry included traditional work translated ...”

“... Just as the Muslim world was vibrating to the ‘insult’ visited on the Prophet Muhamed (Peace Be Upon Him) by an Anglo-Pakistani fictionist of genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia ...”

“... and noble (with Judas yearning and troubled). In the NG’s picture Christ, suddenly recognised by the company at supper (and also with downcast eyes), looks plump-cheeked and almost debauched, a grown-up version of one of Caravaggio’s grape-eating boys. Not known to me is a painting of Christ by Galli, which shows him ...”

“... the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines’. By the early 1970s, everyone was familiar with it: it was the face of a celebrity, a guest on the Parkinson talk show, wreathed in fag smoke and opining splendidly. And it remains pretty well known: the quirkiest testimony to its renown comes in The Habit of ...”

“... Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US responses to genocide by her ...”

“... to her own habitual lateness – Colin Farrell recited ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the last two years of her life, when he was in his thirties and she was in her late seventies, Farrell had become one of Taylor’s closest friends. They met in an LA hospital in 2009 (she was there for a heart procedure and he for ...”