“... to Montagu, this was no cause for alarm: the cost and ratio of raw footage to edited film for Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran were similar. Because the film had to be sent back to Hollywood for processing, Eisenstein never had access to rushes; so he filmed more takes than he would have needed, just in case. Never having made a film before, the Sinclairs ...”

“... overreaching and distracting in the appreciation of the arts. The ‘principle’ of art being ‘self-reflective’, i.e. too much about itself, Ricks writes, ‘like all others, has always been tempted to escalate its claims, to make itself the one thing necessary, as if art’s own nature were the only thing with which art were ever occupied’. True ...”

“... act with righteous violence, sometimes not. Often they are stymied by the peevishness and self-interest of police bureaucracy. They live in the real world, the fallen world: the attractions of crime are far more potent than they are. But how often does that version of police work play in the heads of actual policemen? In most popular culture, the ...”

“... querulous and troublesome dependents: the blind poet Anna Williams; the drunk and morose physician Robert Levet, commemorated by Johnson in a beautifully spare poem of 1782; a young black servant, Frank Barber, whom he sent to school at his own expense, and to whom he left a large sum of money; and the ‘surly slut’ Poll Carmichael, probably rescued from ...”

“... It comes from encountering speech as an impenetrable wall – except it isn’t really, as Robert Frost knew. (He used the metaphor of people speaking through a wall, where you can discern the tone but not the words, in his ars poetica ‘The Sound of Sense’.)One could extract an entire book on Proust from Essays Two. When she agreed to translate Du ...”

“... of human shit. The book’s most extraordinary feature though is Carrington’s unsettling lack of self-pity. She describes how her parents sent her nanny to see her: ‘Tirelessly, Nanny repeated, “What have they done to you … what have they done to you,” and wept by my bed … I was exasperated by it, for I felt at that moment that my parents were ...”

“... connections between one episode and the next. Thrown among other people, he is revealed to be a self-satisfied fraudster, ‘a perfect little saint, insufferable, always merry, always friendly, always polite’, much like ‘those serial killers who … to everyone’s surprise, turn out to be good husbands, good fathers, good friends – it was a question ...”

“... around this time, ‘the sex appeal of the inorganic’. In his documentary The Century of the Self (2002), Adam Curtis argues that advertising co-opted psychoanalysis, and the same could be said of Surrealism – that advertising exploited its art of subliminal suggestion for the purposes of commercial persuasion. For Danchev this is no bad thing. He ...”

“... to tell. Naturally he is scathing about the British (and foreign) banks’ lavishing of money on Robert Maxwell twenty years after the Board of Trade had stigmatised him as unfit to run a public company; hundreds of non-bankers could have told them he was a crook. But Taylor’s book makes clear that this sort of misjudgment is what one should expect from ...”

“... and her determination to make her argument accessible to those without any legal training is a self-consciously political act. Her introduction promises that legal terms will be explained as needed and directs the reader in addition to a useful glossary of such terms at the back; only on a very few occasions did I stumble across a word that eluded either ...”

“... of brooding about America and Europe, the past and the future, art and society, influence and self-reliance, was coming to a head in a gush of discussion. The issues raised by the Regionalists, the Mexican muralists, by the question of abstract art, or by Surrealism, were all pointing in the same direction – towards the definition of a truly American ...”

“... transgression, gaiety transfiguring all that dread. Yet Greenblatt, having with whatever degree of self-awareness accomplished the fundamental shift from determinism to a random multiplicity, finds himself faced with a phase of history in which the end seems indeed to be inscribed in the beginning, in which the dice are loaded and all fall one way. There is a ...”

“... to the textbook view that John Locke’s contractual theory of government simply demolished Robert Filmer’s efforts at assimilating the authority of kings and fathers, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government did not drive patriachal ideas out of circulation. Indeed, it was Locke who was hardly read in the early 18th century: his ideas struck no ...”

“... the dogma of ‘consensus’, which in its turn is another aspect of the whole system’s loss of self-confidence. Newspapers which once cheered or booed the rival teams as they contended now conceive the football ground itself to be in need of defence. Evil men are crawling forward, determined to tear up the weedy old turf. Scargill, Benn, Ken ...”

“... Scottish control of the trade to England was a valuable source of revenue. Scots have long held self-congratulatory beliefs about their educational system. It is claimed that in the 18th and 19th centuries it was a bond, with all social classes using the parish school, and at the same time a source of social mobility so far as it enabled the ‘lad ...”