“... by the index. There’s Bette Davis and Joe Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. There’s Basil Dean and James Dean, Jack Warner of Dock Green and Jack Warner of Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield lines up alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore. Kim Novak and Ivor Novello are neighbours, but then so are ...”

“... let alone her 13-volume novel Pilgrimage, whose experimental narrative anticipated those of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It’s an odd conjunction: on the one hand, Joyce and Woolf; on the other, Dorothy Richardson, Modernist, struggling to light a recalcitrant wood stove or wearing galoshes to cook breakfast in a flooded kitchen. In the Twenties and ...”

“... are not long sentences, purring and humming, those magnificent oceangoing structures launched by James or Mann or Proust: they are sentences that have forgotten to stop. Anyone who has seen elderly, broken-backed dachshunds being walked in parks with rollerskates supporting their middles will get the picture, but there are no rollerskates here. It may be ...”

“... the place of traumatic origin overlap only notionally. Those are not the only possible Vietnams: James Carver, the central character of ‘The Americans’, doesn’t want to experience at ground level a country he knew only from forty thousand feet as a bomber pilot. It’s his wife, Michiko, who wants to visit, convinced by Japanese relatives who had ...”

“... I’d written about another recent film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged (an adaptation of James Lasdun’s story ‘The Siege’), which was somehow rated PG. Much of the time I spent with my parents was in foyers and auditoriums across London, and on the journeys there and back. My mother was the more regular companion, my father the more ...”

“... was marked last year by the publication of a good biography, The Lives of Robert Ryan by J.R. Jones, and a retrospective series at Anthology Film Archives in New York, which screened a few of his films under the title ‘An Actor’s Actor’.* In his last years, Jones says, he got the delayed recognition of a plaque ...”

“... poetry with the way the names of places and characters are put to work in the writings of David Jones in order to see how purely poetic, how non-programmatic, how free from the whiff of the scholar’s midnight oil, are the topographic and mythological elements in MacLean’s work. Jones often intended to instruct his ...”

“... and writing about her work off and on for about twenty years. Her story is inspirational.’ Gavin James Bower, who describes Cahun as ‘the most singularly fascinating creative spirit of the 20th century’, begins his short biography by saying: ‘My name’s Gavin, and I’m a Cahunian.’ His obsession, or addiction, dates back only ten years or so but ...”

“... next door to Nijinsky at a club swimming-pool in Bar Harbor, the set-designer Robert Edmond Jones was surprised by a knock at the door: I open it. A middle-aged man stands there, exquisitely dressed in fastidious nuances of pearl grey which harmonise with the tones of his silvery, scented moustache. He is tall and willowy and his delicate hands are ...”

“... News International over the past year have given us many memorable moments, but Rupert and James Murdoch’s appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons last July is first among them. While James cut a predictably bitter figure, his octogenarian father could hardly have seemed ...”

“... Put briefly, his theme runs thus. The city fathers, defenders of monarchy, not Parliament, under James I, and again allied to the Crown from the autumn of 1641, were nevertheless temporarily ‘alienated’ from their natural ally during the 1630s. The City was estranged as a result of Royal attacks on municipal and corporate privileges which have long ...”

“... out, has done this with particular fervency, and nowhere more so than in Oxford. When Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor of Greek from 1960 until 1989, published a collection of essays on the history of his discipline, he called it Blood for the Ghosts, referring not only to the necromantic scene in Homer’s Odyssey but also to a celebrated speech on Greek ...”

“... his point with a quotation from the philosopher John Dewey (one of several Americans, from William James to Emerson, whom Bromwich has found useful), making a distinction between vicious abstractions and liberating abstractions. Bromwich continues: Hazlitt supposed that nothing is by its nature either abstract or concrete. Our counting it as one or the other ...”

“... and Robert Adamson, with their studies of Newhaven fisherfolk, the rather less gifted Rev. Calvert Jones, the Frenchman Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, who, though trained in chemistry, had to learn the elements of photography from a Lille chemist said to have worked with Talbot. From here, the process continued to spread: to Charles Marville, to Eugène ...”

“... to women. The First World War offered a way out of her violent and miserable first marriage to James Marr and she came to London with her young son to take up a position at the Ministry of Munitions, responsible for women’s welfare in the department of aircraft manufacture. After the war she changed her surname to Spry, implying that she was married to ...”