“... than a rethinking of the model. In fact, Linklater suggests in an interview, his work on Boyhood may have helped Before Sunset and Before Midnight to come into being. In Boyhood the photographic interest, so to speak, is in the children’s changing from round infants into lanky teens, and in the record of the period, those ageing rock songs, that first ...”

“... after such a long journey. It is true Afrikaner hospitality and, however odious my escort here may be, they are deeply embedded in this culture and they can’t say no to its hospitality. Besides, however pressing it may be to get me to Durban Central, they’ve had only one smallish meat pie each for their police ...”

“... arrangement, and it is soon to cease. With effect from the issue which goes on sale on 22 May – two issues from now, that is to say – we shall be coming out on our own, twice a month. The New York Review will be represented on the board of the company which has been formed for this purpose. But from now on the London Review will not only be edited ...”

“... drawn from the wider culture of the time which illuminate what its implicit artistic theory may well have been. For the sculptors’ attitude towards the qualities inherent in the wood with which they were to contend, and whose qualities they were to elicit by their skill, Baxandall turns to Paracelsus’s notion of chiromancy – the art of reading the ...”

“... who can see, and God knows Cobb doesn’t go about with his eyes shut, a first-class funeral may often be tragic, but it is also much better than a family dinner: it is a kind of photographic developer and fixer of the life of the notables. Especially in the department of the Nord: in Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing this sad ceremony was the connecting link in ...”

“... becomes a season in hell, a life sentence. Simple things like buttons start to defeat you. You may feel constantly bilious. Your handwriting becomes illegible, the fountain pen redundant. Five miles with a walking group of elderly dons became too much for me. When I ceased to be able to manage even two miles I had to give up. Miles? I now measure my ...”

“... where’s the evidence?Like the United Nations and the World Health and Trade Organisations, Nato may continue to exist on paper, but if it still has any meaning, the onus is on the believers to prove it. Perhaps the United States would take action to defend Estonia or Poland if Russia attacked; but as things stand, there’s no reason to suppose it ...”

“... from translation of one sort or another; nearly every form we have is a borrowed form. One may or may not know that Milton translated his poems into Latin and back again, or that the first nine poems in Robert Frost’s first book correspond to the first nine cantos of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Rather than ...”

“... Greene: ‘This is one of the most famous episodes in Graham Greene’s life. However, it may not be entirely true.’ What has not been questioned by anyone but is vividly absurd to me is ‘the small lady-like’ revolver with the ‘tiny egg-stand’ chambers – he means the cylinder. It seems unlikely that anyone serious about playing Russian ...”

“... shabby, looks at Ophelia in silence, an effect put into action by her narration to Polonius. There may be a kind of echo of this late in the play in the fact that there is a character to report Ophelia’s death but none to save her life – a wholly original, perhaps accidental piece of dramaturgy that always leaves its own silence and chill. Hamlet is and ...”

“... his contact with his Huguenot friends and the behaviour of the Guises and of Catherine de Medici may have had its effect on his later attitude to Mary, Queen of Scots. Be that as it may, one may also see Buchanan’s behaviour in the light of the recent verdict of Jenny Wormald: ‘given ...”

“... systems (programs) whose significance is assigned by human beings, any ‘interests’ we may choose [sic] to ascribe to them are not intrinsic to their nature, but parasitic on our own. It is this which leads me to say in several essays that psychological predicates could not be ascribed in a literal sense to any imaginable computer, even if its ...”

“... made the experience of watching it quite unlike that of classic tragedy, though there, too, we may encounter torture. King Lear works with some paradigm of suffering far below the level of the daily newspaper; so, for that matter, does Beckett’s Not I. At Article Five we were too close to what was going on, as if we were spectators at the real thing, our ...”

“... Andrea Lee remarks in passing she could well investigate at large. She joins the marchers in the May Day parade and shares their exhilaration, feeling ‘a wild, childish excitement’. Yet without explanation her report turns hostile: ‘The rain began to come down harder, and still the monstrous, disorganised spectacle went on, inspiring joy in no one I ...”

“... of Crishi, who is on the make, and worse. (He is, in fact, a cad whose literary ancestors may include the central figure in Francis Iles’s Before the Fact, and even Geraldine Jews-bury’s Count Mirabeau, who enthralls the heroine of her novel Zöe.) He is cashing in on Western preconceptions about the spirituality of the East. It soon becomes clear ...”