“... mild entertainment to be derived from treating detective stories as historical documents through a close study of which reliable short biographies of their protagonists may be built up. In this scholarly activity numerous difficulties, needless to say, confront the biographer. Mr H. R. F. Keating has been driven to the conclusion that Hercule Poirot was aged ...”

“... us anxious for Truffaut, The semi-autobiography in his films is itself a form of disguise. We feel close to him, yet baffled; and what draws us towards him is not his life, which he keeps rather private, but the personal quality of his work. Of all living directors, in fact, he most nearly resembles and rivals his master Jean Renoir. Why then the ...”

“... family’ but actually like a musical. Everybody who came (Judy Garland, Leonard Bernstein, Frank Sinatra, Comden and Green, Vincente Minnelli, Rita Hayworth) was in musicals, and they would sing and dance and make up new routines right there next to the cold cuts. (André Previn said everyone working in the Freed Unit was so ...”

“... Paul Nash​ is as close as we come, many think, to having a strong painter of the English landscape in the 20th century. The uncertainties built into the wording here are part of the point: Nash spent his working life trying to decide if ‘the English landscape’ was something that had an existence, as a value for art, beyond, say, 1918; and what the difference was, in landscape painting, between strength and histrionics; and whether remaining ‘a painter of the English landscape’, with all that followed in terms of a settling of accounts with Constable and Turner, and Blake and Palmer, and Crome and the watercolourists and Ford Madox Brown, was at all compatible with being a painter ‘in the 20th century ...”

“... gay and jaunty treble voice; talks unweariedly, and in a very neat and clear and carelessly frank and ingenious way ... close-cropped, bullet-head, of fair weight, almost quite white; laughing little hazel eyes, jolly hooked nose and most definite mouth; short, short (five feet three or two at the most), swells ...”

“... of her paintings, The Persian Jacket, off the wall of the gallery and back with him to MoMA. (Her close friend Frank O’Hara, working at the museum’s front desk, was there to see Grace’s official entry into the museum; the painting fitted into the cab, but not through the revolving doors, and had to be taken in through ...”

“... by Moore’s raw disapproval, and is wooden and unconvincing. Brian and Jacqueline Moore met Frank and Jean Russell in New York in 1963, and the two couples, all of them interested in journalism and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on ...”

“... Dickens, took her mother’s name followed by that of a leading male actor, William Macready, a close friend of Dickens’s. From this point on the names grow ever grander: Walter Savage Landor Dickens (after the poet, a friend), Francis Jeffrey Dickens (after the founder of the Edinburgh Review, another friend), Alfred d’Orsay Tennyson Dickens (after ...”

“... authentically modern prose, comparable to the fiction of that same generation by Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor and Liam O’Flaherty. Other auto-biographical writers (or non-writers) like Barry and Breen had produced naive, highly-coloured morality tales, written in an idiom derived from the 19th-century nationalist tracts excoriated by Yeats. O’Malley ...”

“... the Globe is over forty years old, though updated in 1961. He wants to amend Adams, and does some close work on theatrical structures, scorning much scholarship that came later and running a special campaign against Glynne Wickham. There is some rousing stuff about the staging of the opening battle in Coriolanus, but to say anything very useful about this ...”

“... the standards of the time this was pretty lukewarm anti-semitism. Jacques Derrida – a Jew and a close friend of de Man’s – finds it inexcusable, but demands that it be dealt with justly. He repeats that the article deeply wounded him, but discovers in it some redeeming qualities: for example, ‘to condemn “vulgar anti-semitism”, especially if one ...”

“... be performed in it; and the minor hall beside it, which can stage chamber operas, is painted close to black inside and needs only a glitter ball to suggest a suburban disco. How come? The exterior of the building was designed by one architect, the Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew ...”

“... to the monarchy ran deep, he was never one to miss out on a party. So in June 1977, Howe and Frank Crichlow, owner of the Mangrove, a Notting Hill restaurant and meeting place for activists, decided to throw a street party with a difference: a celebration of African Liberation Day. Instead of the ubiquitous Union Jack bunting, All Saints Road in Notting ...”

“... turn out to be true after all. This makes absolute nonsense of Jane’s relationship with Frank Churchill: the upright, pure-hearted, melancholy Jane is represented as choosing to enter into a clandestine engagement with a man she does not really love, and (even more ludicrously) is endowed with a romantic yearning for Mr Knightley worthy of Harriet ...”

“... been invoked at all? Would not the work in question be yet more authoritative and persuasive as frank documentary or autobiography? At the centre of Have the men had enough?, a relentlessly monocentric work, is Grandma, who suffers from senile dementia. In the moderate stage of the illness she still remembers the names and faces of those ...”