“... period films I hadn’t seen, an elegant and slow movie about the Italian romance of a no longer young American woman played by Katharine Hepburn. It was shot entirely on location in Venice, and Rossano Brazzi as the love interest comes a distinctly poor second to the city. Lean and H.E. Bates had taken an Arthur Laurents play and reworked it thoroughly ...”

“... would be a fine comic set-piece), seems to have got exceptionally lucky. She meets a handsome young diplomat with a vast new house in Marin County, tells him a pack of lies about herself – her late husband was a surgeon, they had no children, she is a practised interior designer – and is on her way to marrying him when a chance encounter with ...”

“... respectively. The film opens with an intimate introduction to what isn’t quite the cinema. A young woman walks towards us, reading some notes she holds in her hand. She is accompanied by a film crew. The camera is on tracks leading down the right-hand side of the screen from back to front. The cameraman sits behind it, and the camera, at first seen ...”

“... role in Little Caesar, although I did, like most people, pick up the reference when Raft asks young Robinson where he got the ‘cheap trick’ of tossing a coin while he is talking. He got it from Raft himself, who had made the habit his trademark long ago in Scarface. Amid such allusions – and indeed the whole show of organised crime as a sort of ...”

“... her a tendency to melancholia that was deepened by their mutual distrust and dislike. When very young, she stole a bottle of chloroform with the notion of killing herself. As she grew up she turned more to the informal intimacy of the servants’ quarters. ‘She would take refuge in the laundry and curl up among the sheets and tablecloths,’ Jeanne ...”

“... middle. The gist of it was written down when Valéry was 21, maybe a jeune parque, but certainly a young prig. ‘The crisis came at Genoa, on a stormy night in August 1892,’ according to Jackson Mathews, an earlier translator, reverential to the point of a kind of co-preciosity. Later Valéry added wings and staircases and buttresses; none of it, so far as ...”

“... to bully Mexicans. The amplified situation is delicately pictured at the end of the film when a young policeman opens a note Chieko has written to him, indicating that he is not to read it in her presence. We glimpse the text, but can’t read it because we don’t see it for long enough or from the right angle – and a lot of us can’t read Japanese ...”

“... keepers of the flame, while pocketing the revenue for the estate, have no intention of satisfying. Michael Millgate has – quite fortuitously – written a book on exactly the same subject as Ian Hamilton, using the same case-study method. Whereas Hamilton burned his fingers trying to steal Salinger’s flame, Millgate – Hardy’s biographer and the editor ...”

“... him).Brando was right, judging by the 2004 movie version of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford. The film itself is a pedestrian and pretty adaptation that can’t quite decide where it stands on the antisemitism of the main characters, but Pacino is an excellent Shylock, emphasising the character’s furious dignity in the face of ...”

“... father. On Capri he was to see himself as Byron, D.H. Lawrence as Shelley and Francis Brett Young as a more retiring kind of Keats. And Lawrence was fascinated by him, found him sympathetic and good company, and made him the model in his story called ‘The man who loved islands’. The story could just as well be about Lawrence himself, and shows the ...”

“... desperate need for health services, not least to deal with sexually transmitted illness among the young and poor, there is no shortage of breast implants, liposuction and hymen restoration costing upwards of US $400, in a society where the basic wage is around $160 a month. Of course, as with back-alley abortions, there are aesthetic surgeons who work for as ...”

“... plotting between Intelligence agencies looks real, and all the rest looks like fantasy. Like the young Michael Innes, Sarah Caudwell both respects and flouts the conventions of the detective story. Thus was Adonis murdered is a very modern novel using the archaic epistolary method of Clarissa: aptly enough, because it has as much to do with seduction as ...”

“... violence – brought into every home by television – on the picket-lines, where hordes of tough young miners and uniformed policemen sway and grapple in physical combat like Medieval armies. There is the uneasiness about the accountability of the Police. There are the guerrilla raids at night, presumably by striking miners, which leave a trail of damage and ...”

“... among others, Helen of Troy, Narcissus, the Pythia, the serpent from Genesis, an angel and the young Parque herself. James Lawler speaks of the ‘opera’ that is playing in La Jeune Parque, and this is a good metaphor for the tone and population of the other poems too. There are singers, who take on roles, a composer and a conductor, all doing their own ...”

“... The story opens on a picture of a very large young lady, ‘a truly massive young person’, crossing from one house to another in Newport, Rhode Island, site of ‘florid’ villas and other structures ‘smothered in senseless architectural ornament’. On the verandah of the second house she finds her father, an inordinately rich man, sourly awaiting the death of his former partner, a slightly less rich man ...”