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“... his best-known script is notorious for all the wrong reasons: The Canyons, directed by Paul Schrader, a Hollywood thriller pairing the improbable team of Lindsay Lohan and porn stud James Deen. Deen acquitted himself quite well, giving a more convincing, noirish performance than Lohan, whose tardiness and wayward lurches were chronicled in an ...”

“... on ‘The Meaning of Ukrainian Pluralism for the Future of Europe, Russia and the World’, Paul Berman and François Heisbourg kept returning to the idea of Russia as a home for a kind of clerical nationalism, Ukraine as the battleground for liberal values. Were these grand visions, I wondered, actually playing into Putin’s hands? The Kremlin was ...”

“... the Thames by the foot-passenger ferry, and strolling past Pope and Swift’s old hangout, Marble Hill House, I began to feel progressively unburdened. By the time we were trolling up the long grim suburban avenue that links the River Crane to Feltham I was entering a familiar blissful zone: every manky, run-down semi we passed seemed imbued with profound ...”

“... both guying and gratifying his fellow countrymen’s propensity to declare, in the words of the Paul Anka song popularised by Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way.’ Thomas, however, construed these lines personally, as a challenge not only to his dithering, but also to his involuntary sense of poethood, in which choice, he insisted, played no part. ‘It is ...”

“... terms [of COFA].” In the last year and a half, that changed.’I left for Nan Madol with Paul David, another guide from the tourist office. We drove out of Kolonia along the island’s ring road – the complete circuit takes three hours – much of which is lined with single-storey houses, some painted in bright colours and all with a ...”

“... first to be held in Africa – was organised largely by African American women, including Sylvia Hill, who went on to become a dogged anti-apartheid activist.This new shorthand Pan-Africanism has little in common with the compelling political programme that survives today as a set of interlocking cultural assumptions – in the Caribbean, Africa and the US ...”

“... of Bernard is topographical: a footpath here, a tramline there, a series of rings to suggest a hill. Freud maps Bernard’s head as if prospecting – for thoughts, perhaps. ‘That’s lucky,’ Freud murmured when making an etching of Martin Gayford’s head. ‘A form has appeared which I am delineating. It is always there, but it doesn’t always show ...”

“... A fortnight later, the Coldstreamers found themselves raked by gunfire near the summit of a wooded hill. Dazed by malaria, Lieutenant Christopher Bulteel witnessed men leaping from blazing fires; stick grenades being hurled from previously invisible trenches; and sickening scenes of hand-to-hand fighting. As Bulteel and his comrades withdrew, it began raining ...”

“... are doing it. The founding legend of rave concerns the ‘Ibiza Four’: the DJs Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway, who in 1987 went on holiday to Ibiza, took Ecstasy under the stars at the open-air club Amnesia, and watched DJ Alfredo play an unusually eclectic mix of pop, new wave, disco and US house as the sun came up. They ...”

“... proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben Nicholson, Betjeman and all the stuff to do ...”

“... the other half is killing. Many of the men of C Company die in the extended fight to capture a hill from the enemy, but those who reach the top proceed to kill, and kill rampantly, horribly. It is then, during the massacre of the defeated Japanese, that Train is moved to ask: ‘This great evil, where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What ...”

“... in men in question???’ I wrote shriekingly in the margin. A few months​ later she married Paul Suttman, a sculptor so devoted to aesthetics that he told Lucia she was asymmetrical the first time she undressed for him. (She was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of ten.) He chose forks with only two tines, ‘so it was difficult to eat ...”

“... poet’s words and rhythms are not his utterance so much as his resistance,’ Geoffrey Hill wrote in his book about the ‘circumstances of language’, The Enemy’s Country. Resistance is always a way of talking about agency and language and invention; it is a way of trying to sort out our determinisms from our freedoms, of determining where what ...”

“... tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real thing. Americans, starved of völkisch authenticity in their national politicians, thrilled to her presence on the stage. Forty million people ...”

“... the Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial ...”