“... no talking, coughing, clearing of the throat, or any movement whatsoever of the lips. As David Thomson remarks in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, this was a life ‘so primed for legend, it leaves one feeling that the doleful, suspicious Hughes had some hygienic plan for missing life altogether and going straight into myth’. Hughes was, after ...”

“... In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never set eyes on them.’ ‘It was ...”

“... nation. This transition is one of the most remarkable events of the post-war years and, as David Gilmour says in what is by far the best general account of the phenomenon to have appeared so far, it was the King who made it possible. The greatest threat to Spanish democracy came, and still comes, from the Army. Franco had risen to power through the ...”

“... century, that anyone could have won the bid without recourse to questionable, not to say illegal, means. We know that since at least France 1998, bribes, presents and favours have been handed out by every successful World Cup host. The Sunday Times investigation into the bid concluded that Qatar is no different. As for alcohol, weak beer from one of Fifa’s ...”

“... the rhythm steadies them as they climb near their limits: it gives them something to focus on, a means of earthing their rational fears and their neuroses. And in Mountain for July/August 1978 there is a photo of one American climber reading the Bhagavad-Ghita to another on a granite face in New Hampshire. Each one of us has a threshold beyond which we feel ...”

“... feat. Golf has created its own brand of techno-narcissism: high-spec equipment understood not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, a mirror to the prowess of the individual user. One of the sport’s most credibility-threatening sideshows is an elite competition designed solely to test the capacity of special techniques and customised equipment to ...”

“... rendered almost three million of the country’s 14 million Kurds homeless – and they have by no means finished. When I first came to Diyarbakir, I had no inkling of Turkey’s attitude to its Kurdish community. I swallowed the official line that the region had been closed because of the Soviet threat to Nato’s eastern flank. Kurds were merely colourful ...”

“... slabs of plangent sound steadily ringing out. A Pollock affects us through the abundance of its means, a Newman through the sparingness of its means. The slight curve in a band of colour in Adam suffices to evoke a human figure moving. Almost all the surface of Eve is a vermilion rectangle, but this appears to contain so ...”

“... member, I have now read, in addition to the biography, the full-length critical studies by David Mikics and James Naremore, watched Jan Harlan’s excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison Castle: a 13-pound art-historical tome containing solid articles on every ...”

“... a bit remote, severe with himself but gentle to others, capable of laughter but ‘by no means a party animal’. The meta-message of Coetzee’s co-operation comes across as ‘nothing much to see here’, and that’s mostly the case with the biography too. The same can’t be said of Here and Now, a collection of communications between Coetzee and ...”

“... the characters’ rich, funny thought-lives, but they can’t access one another’s. Their chief means of understanding other people, and the world, is not speech but sight. The opening section, ‘The Party’, is told from the point of view of an unnamed elderly widow living alone with her cat in a terraced house, her solitude broken only by visits ‘once ...”

“... Catherine appeared before a local magistrate and formally accused Father Girard of using unholy means to seduce her. According to her deposition he had breathed into her mouth, after which she had developed unnatural passions. A lawyer with Jansenist sympathies then became involved in the case and published dozens of briefs, some of them hundreds of pages ...”

“... can apply to time as well as space, but it’s sad that Weight and Measure will stay – which means, being site-specific, exist – for so short a time. Ironically, it has the look of a great ...”

“... oligarchy as much as it suits a rapacious one. As Mount points out, this sense of powerlessness means we live in a world very different from the one envisaged by some of the prophets of the new oligarchy. James Burnham, author of The Managerial Revolution (1941), envisaged a post-democratic order in which power was concentrated in the hands of an elite ...”

“... a full-time calling, the periodical press of the day, particularly local newspapers, offered a means for them to put their best efforts into print. In this way, a New York judge named Henry Livingston published his children’s verses beginning ‘’Twas the Night before Christmas’ in a local paper in the 1820s, only to have a more established poet ...”