“... to Jean-Paul Belmondo, that his palms started to get clammy. ‘Jean-Paul, let me introduce you to Mark Thatcher, just back from Saudi Arabia.’ A few stiff drinks in the Paris nightclub and he carried it off – until Roman Polanski walked in with his usual compliment of nymphets. ‘Roman, this is Andrew Lloyd Webber.’ Time to run. The first chapter of ...”

“... Bordwell is always sharp and often funny; Perez is always subtle. But it isn’t enough to mark off what you don’t like by satire or punctuation, by upper-case letters and quotation-marks. All you’re doing is refusing to argue, evoking other views as monolithically foolish and faddish, saying that what you don’t like about them is that you ...”

“... is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion,’ according to Francis Bacon, a remark Palmer considered one of his ‘very deepest sayings’. Topography in Palmerland is usually richly askew, as though the separate elements of its landscape were somehow too exuberantly full of their own reality to be kept within more ...”

“... life, he would stubbornly defend his communist convictions and just as stubbornly crave every mark of status and honour. How did​ he become a historian? Evans dates the transformation from his return to Cambridge as a postgraduate student in 1946; I’m not sure I agree. True, Hobsbawm received his PhD in 1951 and held a junior research fellowship at ...”

“... Warren 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 ...”

“... of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual proclivities deserve more attention here, come forward as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the ...”

“... with the dignity I expected. Duly noted.’13 November 2021. The court closes for several days to mark the anniversary of the attacks. In Paris, the tone is solemn. Éric Zemmour gives a speech in front of the Bataclan. He twists Hollande’s statement to his own ends:The former president of the Republic said himself that he knew that terrorists would ...”

“... or five books open around the house,’ Butler said in one of the interviews collected by Consuela Francis in Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009). ‘And I’ll go out for my morning walk … and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce.’The voice of the interviews is pretty much like the voice of Butler’s few but marvellous ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is very Oulipian: it lists, in alphabetical order, every single word, number and punctuation mark that occurs in the 1873 Charpentier edition of the novel. And by ‘list’, I mean list: the book has six vertical columns to a page, and prints out the word each time it occurs. So the word et, which features 2812 times in the novel, is printed out 2812 ...”

“... express his admiration. Now Carlyle met and disapproved of Lamb, Godwin, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review and Charles Buller were old friends, and Irving too, though Irving – now a popular preacher absorbed in miracle cures and speaking in tongues (‘hoo-ing and ha-ing’) – was making Carlyle increasingly uneasy. Mill he ...”

“... with a woman like Gemma Galgani? Like her medieval predecessors, she received the stigmata, the mark of Christ’s wounds. Like them, she was beaten up by devils. Like them, she performed miracles of healing after her death. When you look at her strange life, you wonder what kind of language you can use to talk about her – through which discipline will ...”

“... Arthur’s face … ‘Now for Fred,’ said Hugh … [His] composition seemed to me to miss its mark. Those babbling puppets with their inane inconsequent talk had no individuality; there was nothing in them … But here was my mother for the third time wiping tears of joy from her eyes … ‘Oh, you clever people!’ said my mother. ‘Why don’t you all ...”

“... more wrong. Had he qualified his assertion with ‘in fifty years’ he might have been nearer the mark. He was also mistaken when he wrote four years earlier of the ‘fading influence’ of Stockholm City Hall, the most scrutinised building of the period. Summerson’s predictions proved to be no more than wishfulness founded in the conviction that the true ...”

“... still unaccustomed role of global superpower show a strong family resemblance. ‘History,’ as Mark Twain noted, ‘doesn’t often repeat itself; but it rhymes.’ I first saw Vietnam in November 1966, on assignment from the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times. I arrived in Saigon with a letter from my editor I could easily have written myself, and a hazy idea of ...”