“... 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 ...”

“... called the ‘Cahiers’, maybe at their own expense. ‘Why do the friends do this? It can only be that they believe, in some real way, the friend’s life and work belongs to them … It speaks for them because they shared a place in time.’She begins her present book, which ‘may or may not be a biography of Kathy ...”

“... Auden remarked that to read pornography in any other way than as a sexual stimulus is to be bored to tears. Crime fiction is similar: you read it for the story, and literary pretensions are unwelcome. The right style is spare, understated. You don’t want philosophy, psychology, political reflections, purple passages or digressions on the Battle of Waterloo ...”

“... increasingly aware of its multiracial character: a chapter of history of which all Britons can be proud. As Christopher Brown’s excellent recent book on the abolition movement suggests, Britain, the world’s leading slave trader in the 18th century, later presented abolition as irrefutable proof of its virtuous motives as it embarked on a new era of ...”

“... for Sherlock Holmes’s or Hercule Poirot’s ingenious but ultimately arbitrary explanation to be exposed as just another false trail. One of the many pleasing things about Jedediah Berry’s first novel is that the plot hinges on a famous detective’s most celebrated cases having been solved incorrectly. The hero of The Manual of Detection is Charles ...”