“... Anonymous city, handheld camera, actors who scarcely seem to be acting: we may think we know where we are, more or less. This is surely the New Wave by way of Neo-Realism, early Truffaut chasing late Rossellini. Didn’t we get over this? How could a film in this vein, namely L’Enfant, written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, win the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year? To say nothing of the same prize won by their film Rosetta, a venture in just the same vein, in 1999 ...”

“... said it was a rationale for getting jobs for your friends and excluding your enemies. True as this may be of our present regime, it was unfair to him and had been put to him under torture, which he sympathetically said he could not bear. But sympathy here may not be our last emotion: Savonarola turned out to be a ...”

“... and little considered constitutional implications – makes it much harder to know what may happen if there is no clear winner. Opinions about how easy it would be to engineer an election before the five years are up vary from no problem to no way (the truth is probably somewhere in between). What’s more, previous nail-biters were straight two-way ...”

“... and functions); they are often (perhaps always) conscious; and they are often intensional. (You may wonder why philosophers sometimes spell ‘intentional’ with a t and sometimes with an s; and why Deacon feels compelled to compound the homonymity with the neologistic ‘ententional’. But it is better not to ask.) Deacon’s book is about the way ...”

“... about legal processes framed at a level of generality large enough to embrace all member states may well be unworkable in some of them. The first of these difficulties has historically been tackled by the use of the margin of appreciation, a literal rendering, meaningless in English, of the French marge d’appréciation, which means margin of judgment. It ...”

“... When the queen came to Ireland in May 2011 a number of the great, good and merely deserving were locked in the 1937 reading room of Trinity College Dublin for two hours without their mobile phones, before being allowed into the beautiful Long Room of the Old Library to await her arrival. The ratio of men to women was about the same as you find at the front of the plane – five to one perhaps, of suit to skirt – and the conversation veered towards the kind of disaster that happens when Wives Are Not Invited ...”

“... human sentiment’. The ratio of reverie to dramatic incident will be unusually high, though there may well be a sudden flurry of events near the end. In The Blue Guitar our man is Oliver Orme. He ‘used to be a painter’ but he gave it up. (In a taste of strained puns to come, he says: ‘Ha! The word I wrote down first, instead of painter, was ...”

“... defendants start taking the stand; but since that isn’t expected to happen until the summer they may well – who knows? – be on holiday by then. But the particular reason this trial hasn’t been worth reporting is that all the main elements of the prosecution’s case were widely known long before it began, were known, in fact, before the suspects were ...”

“... curious details, bits of the real but not part of any attempt at realism, pieces of a puzzle that may not even exist. Feet, legs, hands, sand, straw, mud, laceless old shoes; dulled or hallucinating faces staring past the camera at some lost version of infinity; countless shots of the backs of persons walking away from us, or figures whose heads are out of ...”

“... evoking the uncanny. And the uncanny is everywhere: in the actor/actress in a Kafka adaptation who may provide a link between Trumilcik, Jackson and Carol; in the sudden attraction to Miller that the college attorney seems to develop; in the calls to a battered women’s shelter someone appears to be making from Miller’s office at night; in Miller’s ...”

“... But in Roma he stays at home, or goes back home: to Mexico, to the past, to the family. The title may not suggest home to many of us: we’re not bound to know that Roma is the name of a neighbourhood in Mexico City, any more than we have to remember that Petty France is in London and Little Italy in New York. But then home isn’t always what we think it ...”

“... wild roots and by theft: come and lay down your arms … so that your thirst and great hunger may be appeased.’ Today, only a small stone memorial in the Omaheke desert marks this crime. In Bengal, the East India Company secured hegemony by force of arms over a once prospering land. According to the governor, Warren Hastings, as many as ten million ...”

“... Nixon, Carter, Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Losing 35 seats (that’s the number as I write; it may go one or two higher) puts him right in the middle of the range. He did much better than most of his predecessors in the Senate, but that was in large part because the electoral map favoured him, as it did in 2016. Many things about the campaign were ...”

“... Artistic influence​ may benefit from a degree of misunderstanding: it keeps it from lapsing into imitation. By the time William Morris launched the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1860s, it took a certain wilful ignorance to believe, as he and Ruskin did, that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals were anonymous artisans, working humbly for the glory of God ...”

“... and the manger in a Nativity are unclear. Clouds supporting angels and broad swathes of drapery may make strong patterns against these backgrounds, but even the angels seem to be contained in the same shallow space as the other figures.Photographers and cinematographers were the last Caravaggisti; it is Caravaggio light that first picks out Harry Lime’s ...”