“... is about. The salvationist strand to design on the Underground is nothing new. It goes back to Frank Pick, the Yorkshire puritan and businessman who imposed modern aesthetics and a measure of uniformity on the maze of private lines brought together in 1933 as London Transport. Pick also did a great deal of straightforward management, but his name is always ...”

“... to suppose that, lulled by the calm and intelligence of their interlocutor, they were more frank than is usually the case when dealing with the media. The former Liberal leader and recent EU commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, for example, is quoted as saying: ‘One must never underestimate the degree of hatred that Dutch people feel for Moroccan and ...”

“... died, and a fifth is missing. At the start, her daughter has received what may well be the missing Michael’s clothes, washed up from the sea ‘in the far north’ at Donegal. During the course of the play, Maurya tries to persuade her remaining son, Bartley, not to ride off with the horses to the Galway fair, predicting that he, too, will be taken by the ...”

“... birth, life, death and meteoric rise to fame, Ern Malley has continued to provoke virulent debate. Michael Heyward’s shrewd and funny book not only provides full social and literary contexts for the affair, but explores Malley’s almost equally intriguing afterlife. Much to the dismay of his two inventors, he was no sooner invented than he cut loose and set ...”

“... of that one film I would love to read a thorough life of Ford (such as Joseph McBride managed for Frank Capra, that other fragile hero). The reasons Ford ‘has such defenders’ are amply supplied in the book McBride has now written about him, which shows how we might do better not to understand our enemies too quickly, how even idiots have art in ...”

“... photography, Latin American mail art, an archival dive into the New York poet and MoMA curator Frank O’Hara, and so on.For the most part art-historical terms – Fauvism, Cubism and the rest – are avoided in wall texts in favour of general rubrics like ‘Abstraction and Utopia’ and ‘Design for Modern Life’, and inclusive settings like ‘Paris ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There are commendable extensions to the New Art Centre at Roche Court, to a nearby house by Michael Manser and to the Council House in Salisbury. Douglas Stephen’s David Murray John Tower in central Swindon is one of the finest buildings in Britain of its age (early 1970s) – a sleek homage to ...”

“... thoughtfully about from one clan grave to another while the present Stuart claimant to the throne, Michael James Alexander, was being interviewed by BBC Scotland. He is a gentle Belgian socialist who once worked as a waiter in Edinburgh but has taken up PR. ‘I felt it was important to attend,’ he told the cameras. ‘Ethnic cleansing was carried out after ...”

“... of responsibility.’The Elephant Man and the film that followed, an ill-fated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, were Lynch’s works as a hired hand, interesting for the ways his signature slips into the frame. A mid-budget Victorian period drama starring genteel English thesps was hardly a natural project for Lynch and he had a miserable time ...”

“... to Gelpi, plumbs great depths. Despite its uniquely complicated motives and its unusually frank statements of intent, living in Time is in fact the logical outcome of Gelpi’s methods and beliefs, already demonstrated and outlined in his two important books on the American poetic tradition, The Tenth Muse (1975) and A Coherent Splendour (1987). In ...”

“... and has been followed by Mark Thornton Burnett’s edition of the plays for Everyman in 1999, and Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey’s for Penguin in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in Deptford supplies, the ...”

“... is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights. We learn that Frank Capra, for example, is not the populist he is supposed to be: ‘His politics are . . . a kind of middle-class noblesse oblige.’ Keaton is not a rebel or a clown but a person who discovers that ‘setting up residence in the world’ is much harder than ...”

“... Cecil, the brave but dim-bulbed scion of the Salisburys. We met in Meikles bar and had a very frank chat, in the course of which Worsthorne said that while he could easily look on, say, Asians, as equals, he found it very tough to extend the same indulgence to the natives of the Dark Continent. When I told him I was off to interview Sir Roy Welensky, once ...”

“... media. We encounter it all the way from Taxi Driver and Mulholland Drive to The Diary of Anne Frank and Amy Winehouse, from the classical hubris of O.J. Simpson to the collective hubris of ecological disaster. With Freud and the existentialists, tragedy continues to colonise philosophy, as David Kornhaber points out. In a fluid, fragmented culture hostile ...”