“... English nobility in the later 14th century, if only because in the 15th century religion led Sir John Fastolf to beaueath most of his war booty to Magdalen College. With Braudel on ‘The Rejection of the Reformation in France’ we are getting on. As a parting thought, Braudel throws in the suggestion that the Reformation halted wherever it ran into the ...”

“... work in archives and libraries, was salutary. When working on Verandah he reported to his brother John that ‘the time is, as for Queen Mary, eaten up by the research, by the absolute necessity of reading every line of every document so as to absorb; the absorption goes on day and night, sleeping, waking, eating or talking; and I cannot at my time of life ...”

“... Cartier-Bresson which are turned to when photography is used as propaganda and shows public faces (John F. Kennedy, for example, or Anwar Sadat) in private places looking kind and nice. Avedon’s West pictures, with only one or two exceptions, show a person or a couple standing square on to the camera: they are full face, and sometimes show the hands, never ...”

“... Short Character has always seemed to me a brilliantly assured book, but it hasn’t enough detail. John Middleton Murry’s book is still vivid, but it’s a quirky performance, enamoured of a few lurid ideas. Irvin Ehrenpreis’s biography is assumed to be definitive, and I agree that the ascertainable facts are rigorously displayed. But it is an unexciting ...”

“... helpful, could be mistaken for an angel (if he weren’t Terence Stamp, fresh from playing Troy in John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd). He understands everyone, leads them to discover their secret selves. He saves one character from suicide, turns another into an artist, and inspires another, a very rich man, to give his factory to his ...”

“... has a long tradition in Britain. Thomas Grant, in his book about the Old Bailey, Court Number One (John Murray, £10.99), gives special credit to Rebecca West, who wrote about treason and spy cases from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Sybille Bedford, whose account of the trial of Dr Bodkin Adams in 1957 is ‘generally regarded as the finest single volume account ...”

“... That would confirm the bitch plot. Still, we’re not going to find out. It’s good to learn that John Huston was one of the screenwriters, adapting a play by Owen Davis. Two other great if overwrought films allow us to see a little more of the range as well as the consistency of what the Davis character is up to. They are Now, Voyager (1942) and Dark ...”

“... you leave.’ But why do we come? There is an eerie underlining of the question in the fact that John Badham’s Dracula, with Frank Langella in the titular role, also appeared in 1979. But Langella is all charm, as Bela Lugosi (1931), Christopher Lee (1958 and six other years) and Gary Oldman (1992) also were in their way: hard to imagine them out of ...”

“... kinds, often several times a week. Cryptome isn’t entirely faceless: it’s run by a man called John Young, a Vietnam-era radical and a practising architect in New York, now in his eighties. But he’s a cantankerous repeller of journalists and keeps himself to himself. And the website – plain red links on a white page – is the model of the way a ...”

“... Visiting​ the sea for its own sake is a two-hundred-year-old idea, roughly speaking. John Nash finished his expansion of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton in 1822. A few years later, Boulogne, on the other side of the Channel, became an early beach resort: ‘You will find whatever you are looking for there,’ Manet wrote to a friend ...”

“... would be legal. Antonin Scalia articulates the doctrine in the movie, and there is mention of John Yoo, a clever lawyer who thought war crimes were a thing of the past and could smuggle anything, including torture and boundless invasion of privacy, onto the right side of the law. The 2008 election prevented a lot of this from happening. If the Republicans ...”

“... The justification for this survey of a single year is made in a nod to Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, who described 1931-32 as his annus mirabilis. It was a hugely productive year, in part because of the new work Picasso was creating for the retrospective, in part, it’s claimed, because of his relationship with the 22-year-old Marie-Thérèse ...”

“... so he can make changes easily. He finishes the painting off in oil. Many realist painters, like John Sloan and the Ashcan School, render architecture in a more or less gestural fashion. But Estes is fascinated by architectural form and the way it can be used to frame interiors and the reflections contained within those interiors. In his work the edges of ...”

“... senior members of the service shown in the film – the now dead Control, nicely overplayed by John Hurt in flashback, had five suspects since he included Smiley – but that we are given no reason to care which one it is. It is part of the machinery of any thriller that the villain could be anyone; of the machinery of a good thriller that the villain ...”

“... The chief pleasure of the new version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the sight of John Travolta as the model bad guy. He is genial and livid by turns, entirely persuasive in both moods, the very image of crazed behaviour, and far more engaging and unhinged than he was in Pulp Fiction. That film brought certain of his earlier roles to mind, but this one makes us want to rethink Grease entirely, and maybe the whole genre of the musical ...”