“... the pieces are published here in English for the first time. The editors, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, are sensitive to what might be ‘impolitic’ or ‘morbid’ about such a collection, but their introduction amply and lucidly justifies their assembly of these works, and the only snag with the book as a whole is that it makes certain rhetorical ...”

“... in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel both/And be one traveller’. He looked at one road, then took ‘the other, as just as fair/And having perhaps the better claim,/Because it was grassy and wanted wear’. The better claim rests on ...”

“... The writer, grizzled, sun-tanned, wearing only desert boots, shorts and sunglasses, sits outdoors in a wicker chair, checking a page in his typewriter. The picture appears on the covers both of Ian Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood and of Tom Dardis’s Some Time in the Sun and instantly announces several elements of a familiar legend. Even in black and white the image is full of warm shadows, and the uncropped version fills out the legend a little further ...”

“... Most of our current nostalgia goes to the Fifties and Sixties when it doesn’t go to some Victorian never-never land. The Seventies! How could we forget them? Or remember them? Were they anything other than time on the clock? There was a lot of supposed recovering from the Sixties, and of denying the Sixties ever happened. It was an age of narcissism, some said, but we were too self-absorbed to notice ...”

“... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...”

“... One of the great attractions of James Fenton’s verse is the way it manages so often to be both plain and cryptic at once. It urges us to think about what we can’t quite know, and it favours certain strategies for doing this. ‘It is not the houses,’ Fenton writes in ‘A German Requiem’. ‘It is the spaces between the houses.’ He repeats this logical rhythm several times within the poem sequence and closes the work with it: It is not what they say ...”

“... Some men get the whole world,’ Kim Basinger says. ‘Others get an ex-hooker and a trip to Arizona.’ The camera pauses on the man who has got the world, an ambitious, heroic, decorated and promoted policeman. The actor is Guy Pearce, his face narrow and eager, all sharp planes and angles. He doesn’t look too pleased. The film ends. One of the many attractions of LA Confidential, a glossy, atmospheric movie based on a James Ellroy novel, is its unembarrassed pleasure in this kind of stuff ...”

“... Asked in 1933 what his favourite among his own poems was, Wallace Stevens said he liked best ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, from Harmonium (1923). The work ‘wears a deliberately commonplace costume’, Stevens said, ‘and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry’. He didn’t remember much about writing the poem except ‘the state of mind from which it came’: ‘I dislike niggling, and like letting myself go ...”

“... Movies tend not to age gracefully. If they’re not still fresh, they look decrepit, or just dead. It’s hard to distinguish between the damage done to the old Frankenstein by Young Frankenstein, to say nothing of The Munsters, and the damage done by time and change on their own. Certainly when Dwight Frye, as Frankenstein’s crippled assistant Fritz, scuttles off down a hill, doubled over his very short walking-stick, it’s hard not to think of Marty Feldman and Gene Hackman and to murmur ‘Walk this way ...”

“... you will go under if you don’t fight back Surely you must see that?It is perhaps worth having Michael Hamburger’s version here, just to hear a slightly different lilt: And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for ...”

“... One​ of the inhabitants of Middle England, the title and the setting of Jonathan Coe’s last novel, part of a location that is also called ‘merrie’, ‘deep’ and ‘old’, thinks that she and others ‘might be living cheek-by-jowl in the same country, but they also lived in different universes’. The language in which these universes fail to communicate is politics, and one of the great insights of the novel is that politics is so often just that: a language and not a topic ...”

“... It was​ an anxious, analysed time, where everything was shifting and complicated except the enduring family romance, the troublesome siblings, the failure to escape the baleful relation with mum and dad. It was a time, as Natalie Robins says in one of her wry moments, ‘when paediatricians functioned as parents, psychiatrists and book critics; when psychoanalysts functioned as judges; and when most mothers and fathers were considered slightly off course ...”

“... Céline​ was not a great admirer of Proust. He called him a ‘half-ghost’, far too preoccupied with the doings of an even ghostlier French aristocracy. For this and many other reasons it’s hard to imagine Céline enjoying the thought of their sharing a sudden posthumous literary limelight. Still, there are ways of winning even late games. When significant missing manuscripts by both writers were discovered in 2018 and 2021, the Proust trove amounted to 76 pages, published as Les Soixante-Quinze Feuillets (that was their name before they vanished ...”

“... Now we must choose, a character in Beckett says, between ruin and collapse. Could we not, another character wonders, somehow combine them? Goldcrest Films, in the mid-Eighties, after days of great splendour, seems to have pulled off this melancholy mixture. The company that gave us Ghandi and The Killing Fields and collected 19 Oscars, then brought us Revolution and Absolute Beginners, exhausted its credit (in several senses) and was bought out ...”

“... The reviews and the hype hadn’t prepared me for Malcolm X at all. I expected it to be dull and worthy, a straight and long-winded retelling of a famous life. I found it lively, pretty dramatic, not all that much too long. It is a glossy parable of the sinner who came to virtue, found fame and power, was threatened and killed: the work, death and glorification of St Malcolm Martyr ...”