“... affair, and Handsworth before, during and after its riot. She is not particularly profound on Ray Honeyford: a good teacher and a decent man, but too insular and self-righteous to head a school where 90 per cent of the children are of Pakistani parents, in a city where race is such an inflammable issue. But her ...”

“... could not afford to buy it back from Boylan, yet if the painting were simply left with him, an X-ray device would inevitably reveal the fake work on top of the unfinished original. Propelled by love and desire, Butcher is speedily entrapped by the belle of Benalla. Marlene is vivacious, and knows how to look after Butcher’s damaged brother, and says she ...”

“... Fuller as well as by the more practical Californian modernism of Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, and other designers of the Case Study Houses in Los Angeles. However, by the late 1970s Piano, Rogers and Foster had diverged. Piano was never so Pop as Rogers nor so high-tech as Foster, and his signature device came to differ as well: whereas Rogers ...”

“... than a regular bowling alley – turns out to be a meeting place for well-dressed admirers of the man the Milwaukee Journal recently called ‘that intelligent young German Fascist’. Hicks gets told to relax: ‘We’re National Socialists, ain’t it? So – we’re socialising. Try it, you might have fun.’ Every secret society in this town, every gang ...”

“... the simplicity worked together. Commenting on the stanza beginning ‘Full many a gem of purest ray serene ...’ he points out that it means 18th-century England had no carrière ouverte aux talents. This is stated as pathetic, but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to alter it ... By comparing the social arrangement to Nature, he ...”

“... Eric wanted to say, ‘him responsible for the Easter Rising.’ 17 February. Stopped by a man outside the post office in Regents Park Road who fishes in his wallet and shows me a note I sent nearly 50 years ago to Bernard Reiss, the tailor in Albion Place in Leeds who made me my first suit in 1954. The note is about two 7/6 seats which I’d booked ...”

“... discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety. Ashenden, who finds most of Driffield’s novels rather boring and melodramatic, has decided that elderly authors who have ‘ceased for twenty years to write anything of ...”

“... conviction, before either relinquishing the broken carcass – ‘I do not want to come between a man and his mother’ – or being relinquished by it. To Garbo’s distress, MGM fired Stiller from the direction of The Temptress: he was taking too long over it and he had ordered the leading man, Tony Moreno, Hollywood’s ...”

“... of burglary for long. Morgan’s imagination thrives, apparently, upon motifs which in another man would be morbid but in him are converted opportunities, no harm left in them. He likes to take big themes – ‘the real Clyde’, Glasgow, blindness, abortion – and drive them far beyond their official forms. Sometimes too far. I can’t make much of his ...”

“... non-event in the calendar of civic discourse, posters appeared out of nowhere with the head of a man who wasn’t quite Frank Dobson. There was nothing peevish or pop-eyed about this citizen. The shirt was open-necked. The tilted look was watchful, eyes narrowed against bright light: a non-combatant shocked to find himself exposed on the hustings. No ...”

“... he recorded countless sunsets disappearing into the sea in the hope of capturing one elusive green ray; he planted flowers so that a month later an actor could pick a rose; he posted mail to a false address to check a plot point that rested on a letter not reaching its destination. But when it came to shooting he abandoned himself to the moment. In 24 feature ...”

“... outlaws acting out the poet’s fantasies and those of his readers. Conrad the Corsair, ‘that man of loneliness and mystery’, is typical. Having got wind that the Turkish Pacha intends to attack him on his ‘Pirate’s isle’, he launches a pre-emptive assault, which involves the dubious tactic of infiltrating the Turkish palace during a ...”

“... real locations among real people going about their ordinary business. Later, after Eileen and a man she’s picked up have had sex in a derelict building, there’s a further montage of a dozen or so shots – many more than mere reality-effect would require – of workmen demolishing a row of houses. Social realism could be said to revive alongside the ...”

“... Sure enough, Jesus appeared to the 16-year-old Moon and informed him that he was the chosen man, thus making him one of the hundred-plus messiahs Korea had spawned in only a century. According to Moon’s official biography, he then gained a degree as an electrical engineer at Waseda University in Japan (though the university has no record that he was ...”

“... according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd … He had much higher spirits. He was much more adapted to life. He ...”