“... a ‘legendary period in movies’. In The Last Picture Show, Welles’s friend and protégé Peter Bogdanovich had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... in front of the court itself, a timid-looking, hair-waxed gentleman stops for the cameras. It’s Peter Badge, the Chief Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate: the hearing will take place before him, and he will make the decision as to whether there’s a case to be tried or not. He looks like a little chaffinch. ‘Mr Badge,’ we are told later, ‘is ...”

“... and Exter, let alone such important directors of Russian descent as Pitoeff, Komisarjevsky, Peter Brook and Jacques Tati, all of which is surely relevant to the modern reader’s view of the subject. He also virtually omits the cabaret and the ‘Blue Blouse’ agitprop movement, though he gives a useful account of the latter’s successor, the TRAM ...”

“... funny account of provincial literary neurosis, had appeared in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came out in 1975, and, deceptively to one side in the same year, stood Johnno, David Malouf’s first prose work. ‘It spread, throughout the ...”

“... AJPT and Lewis, but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English eccentricity: an older world of indulgence, scandal, fun and ...”

“... way be about him – which shuffles in on the guest-list a piece, for example, on Lost Highway, Peter Guralnick’s book about country music. Every so often Marcus extends the rubric: ‘Because of Elvis’s arrival, because of who he was and what he became, because of his event and what we made of it, the American past, from the Civil War to the civil ...”

“... to ‘show … the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’. He cites this remark of Prince Hamlet’s as evidence that ‘Shakespeare certainly thought of his art in this way’ (though only a couple of pages afterwards he criticises earlier commentators for naively or disingenuously trawling the utterances of Shakespeare’s characters for ...”

“... If the latter, it implied that the authority of bishops came from the pope, successor of Peter, chosen by Christ to be the rock on which he built his church (Matthew 16.18), rather than that every bishop directly represented Christ’s authority. Prince-bishops in the Holy Roman Empire were not the only prominent ...”

“... this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that works of literature secreted certain meanings ...”

“... disjunction between them in Bobbio’s account is rather different from how it is set out in The Prince. Ascesis, prohibition, prescription, self-repression can be ‘bad’ means to a good end – ‘bad’ in the sense that unless they contribute to that end, they cannot be commended as ways of life in themselves. But history, alas, has seen to it that ...”

“... after she left the door of its cage open. The bear was subsequently destroyed on the order of the Prince of Wales. Menagerie is a fact-driven narrative with an exemplary commitment to detail. How much could a person expect to be paid for the upkeep of a marsupial in 1611? William Walker, keeper of fowl at the menagerie in St James’s Park, was paid five ...”

“... Jardine who masterminded the notorious ‘bodyline’ tactics of Larwood and Voce; as captain, Peter May too was criticised for short-pitched bowling, time-wasting and nullifying the immortal Sonny Ramadhin’s fiendish spin by simply kicking the ball away down the leg side.It was axiomatic that only the upper-class amateur possessed the leadership ...”

“... like a cartoon wolf while motorbikes crash in her wake.What’s Up, Doc? was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, fresh from the success of The Last Picture Show. For the first time Streisand was in the hands of a director her own age and a denizen of New Hollywood. Bogdanovich, ever the auteur, had worked out every beat to his own exact specifications. In ...”

“... The press attended the dress-rehearsal at the Opéra Garnier in which Nureyev danced the role of Prince Désiré in Sleeping Beauty. The critic René Sirvin, alluding to the recent orbit of Yuri Gagarin, wrote a piece about the Kirov’s own ‘spaceman’, an ‘aerial phenomenon of a stupefying virtuosity and lightness’. So there was enormous ...”