“... that of thousands of others. The first film we see by any major director usually makes a mark, but we don’t always feel we have seen Saturn swallowing his sons.The first Buñuel film seen by most people of my generation who were not film-club addicts was probably Viridiana (1961). After two Surrealist films made in France (Un Chien andalou and ...”

“... and he worked as a pastor in Detroit from 1915 to 1928, where he supported the efforts of Ford workers to organise. He helped to found the Fellowship of Socialist Christians and later served as an editor of the liberal magazine Christianity and Crisis. In the years of his prime, at Union Theological Seminary from 1928 to 1952 (when he suffered a ...”

“... ostrich, Waldo; his father, Ray, died; he had heart bypass surgery and was in and out of the Betty Ford Clinic; and by 1986 he was without a recording contract for the first time in his long career. It wasn’t until the 1990s that things picked up again, when Rick Rubin, the founder of Def Jam records, and the man responsible for the Beastie Boys and LL Cool ...”

“... and Moctezuma’s as a matter of cavalry boots stamping on sandals, though it’s not far off the mark. He delays until late in the book an incident on the Spanish side symmetrical in horror with Moctezuma’s offhand execution order of the little cousin. Cortés polishes his boots, neglected because the expedition’s stock of oil must be reserved for ...”

“... comic Pritt Stick job, like calling the alien in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy after a Ford Prefect car, but a painstakingly careful dovetailing, in which you must mark all the detail of the separations even as you marvel at the join, and one which is replicated across the structure of Mason & Dixon. This is done ...”

“... the elite with an excuse to vaccinate the population with a mind-control vaccine), introduced Mark Steele, a former bouncer from Gateshead who heads an anti-5G organisation called Save Us Now. Steele told the crowd of his concerns about the harmful effects of 5G radiation, particularly on young people. In 1994, Steele was sentenced to eight years in ...”

“... films – seven of them, by my count, anybody else’s masterpiece – and created, with Mark Frost, the show that ‘changed TV for ever’, Twin Peaks. At least to begin with, he took anyone who met him by surprise. Mel Brooks, who produced his second film, The Elephant Man (1980), ‘expected to meet a grotesque, a fat little German with fat ...”

“... Gibb and Hadley and Pauline Hemingway and Mrs Sherwood Anderson and Mrs Bravig Imbs and the Mrs Ford Madox Ford and endless others.’ The writers and artists Stein wrote about didn’t like this theory; they disliked their work being drenched in gossip and personality and anecdote. But I think Stein was right. All art ...”

“... some drama, he raced through Aeschylus, Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman, Chekhov, Dekker, Dryden, Ford, Heywood, Jonson, Marston, Massinger, Middleton, Marlowe, O’Neill, Sophocles, Strindberg and Webster; in March he went on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through ...”

“... Beatty or Ryan O’Neal.’ Imagine The Godfather with Robert Redford as Michael! But Francis Ford Coppola had wanted Pacino from the start and was finally able to persuade the studio execs after they saw eight minutes of footage from The Panic in Needle Park. Pacino had to fly to California to do a screen test, which he didn’t want to do, but Bregman ...”

“... the restrictions of what it contained and, resisting all impatient access, leaving the intractable mark of genius on it, in more, and more unforgettable, images than any other novel ever written. Proust aimed at the sublime. His addiction to hyperbole could become a lame – on occasion even an absurd – striving for it: few passages in Western literature ...”

“... No Pumps! No Surgery!’). Another site, registered to the same address on Heslington Road by ‘Mark Smith’, apparently an alias for Entwistle, was deephotsex.co.uk, which promised ‘Over 150,000 images of innocent teens’, ‘Real World Hidden Sex Cams’ and ‘Live sex shows where you tell girls what to do’. The nastiness of these efforts ...”

“... rallying cry for writers to live up to the rich narrative potential of the lie, as in Conrad, Ford, Nabokov and Welty’s ‘Powerhouse’. ‘What is it?’ (your lie), Waller addresses his audience, and, surprisingly, the band answers with compelling clarinet and trumpet improvisations, commendable non-verbal ‘lies’, vaporising the cynicism in the ...”

“... of the Town’ department, composing reportorial vignettes and musings that helped make his mark even though ‘Talk’ stories were then unsigned. Individual voices such as Updike’s – and, later, Jamaica Kincaid’s and George W.S. Trow’s – managed to peep up despite the magazine’s horse collar of wry urbanity. A volume of Updike’s Talk ...”

“... as champions of plain-speaking in Shakespeare are usually Machiavellian hypocrites (Richard III, Mark Antony, Iago), while the only one to call himself a ‘true-born Englishman’ is Henry Bolingbroke, en route to usurping the throne. Just as strikingly, the one character who appeals to the notion of ‘the King’s English’ is Mistress Quickly in The ...”