“... coherent and considered re-evaluation of classic American cinema. Godard recognised Hitchcock and Lang and Griffith as great masters – alongside Rossellini, Renoir and Eisenstein – but he also recognised the strengths of marginal and eccentric Hollywood productions, the odd films out of the studio system. Talking about his second film, Le Petit Soldat, he ...”

“... investigated fictional character of his age. What was practised as a diversion by Andrew Lang and Ronald Knox has turned into a full-scale critical apparatus. It’s a mock apparatus, and not really engaged with criticism; and yet not just a joke, since it does elucidate something – those aspects of another way of life that for us have now become ...”

“... political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is compelling and its ...”

“... clear authorship of many Hollywood films, ideas or stories did not belong to the individual. Fritz Lang re-made La Bête humaine as Human Desire, and La Chienne as Scarlett Street, Buñuel re-made Diary of a Chambermaid in 1964, and Dudley Nichols’s idea of making Thieves like Us was taken up by Nicholas Ray in 1948 and by Robert Altman in 1974. All these ...”

“... many judiciously chosen reprints. Perhaps Faber or Cambridge will pick up Bogdanovich’s Fritz Lang in America or Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Dreyer in Double Reflection, Rossellini’s Fragments of an Autobiography or Renoir’s Writings 1926-1971. Both Wenders and Scorsese, born in the Forties, became obsessed with the cinema, and with American rock music in ...”

“... beyond the limits of permissible displeasure. And so, in his own way, does the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. Funny Games (1997) is a violent melodrama about a respectable family set upon by nasty criminals, much as in The Desperate Hours (1955) or Cape Fear (1962). (Both films were remade in the 1990s, by ...”

“... superstate, and ‘the people’ is plastered across almost every Euro-story. In February, Michael Portillo was praised for reminding Chancellor Kohl that the nation state was far from a thing of the past: ‘OUR nation is very important to the people of the United Kingdom. We’ve given away enough to Europe already.’ Kohl is ‘just interested in ...”

“... the Olympic charter. Barcelona’s triumph was not its new pedestrian squares, but the presence of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and the rest of the US basketball ‘dream team’.What was Olympism without amateurism? Samaranch attempted to fill the ideological void by bringing the IOC into line with the emerging concerns of international politics in the ...”

“... of characters drawn from Amherst, like the overgrown Texan frat boy Andrew ‘Wang Dang’ Lang. It’s the funniest and most pleasurable of Wallace’s books of fiction. In a 1995 letter to DeLillo, with whom Jonathan Franzen had put him in touch because Wallace was concerned that a passage in Infinite Jest about tennis and nuclear war might be ...”

“... no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the ...”

“... these issues, Noll provides historical footholds for those such as the prominent Jungian analyst Michael Fordham who have raised serious questions as to what is really going on in a treatment that ultimately encourages the patient into active imagination with the promise that he or she will experience ‘the union of the opposites’. Or that urges patients ...”

“... of Modern Art, where they showed Chaplin, Griffith, Von Stroheim, Eisenstein, Murnau, Pabst, Lang. For the greats of the silent era, Kubrick seems to have felt a veneration free of envy. The typical American product of the 1940s drew a different response: he was sure he could make something better. For Kubrick (according to ...”

“... the wind at the top of a pole. And on the day I came, there were many plums rotting on the trees.Michael Fordham, the farm’s owner, was driving a new JCB in and out of one of the barns, lifting grain into a waiting lorry. The farm where we stood was 290 acres in all. ‘But we run a further 700 acres from here,’ ...”

“... I heard that in the month of April there were 67 suicide bombings. I heard Colonel Pat Lang, former chief of Mideast operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency, say: ‘It’s just political rhetoric to say we are not in a civil war. We’ve been in a civil war for a long time.’ I heard that 1600 US soldiers were dead. I heard that every week ...”