“... camera in ways that unsettle the illusion, their gaze breaking out of the world of the film. We may wonder whether the actor is looking at us in the audience or responding to the filmmaker behind the camera; sometimes, the gaze is followed by a dream or memory sequence, or by some other sort of scene from elsewhere in time and space. In the ...”

“... proposal you might hear in another country, even as a joke. Emigration split families, and this may have made the need to gather together stronger for those who remained, even after death. In a country of the dispossessed, it is also tempting to see the grave plot as a treasured piece of land. But the drama of the Irish graveyard was not about ...”

“... taken to give force to the slogan, it redefined the procedure for registering cases. From 1 May this year, in order to ‘protect people’s rights to sue’, cases can no longer be rejected by the registration office except on technical grounds to do with documentation. As a result the number of cases allowed to go to trial jumped by almost a third: a ...”

“... outlay of coupons. A pair of women’s shoes required five coupons – men’s needed seven. This may have been an echo of an old system of pricing shoes: by the size of the foot and the amount of leather. But it may also have given men’s styles more cachet. The Peal brogue is a woman’s version of a man’s shoe, and ...”

“... minister set the stage for the emergence of Beppe Grillo and Five Star in the local elections of May 2012. In France as the fiscal compact began to bite, François Hollande’s presidency was dead almost before it had started.Amid all these events, Germany can easily seem like a bastion of stability, with ‘Merkel über alles’ its anthem. But beneath the ...”

“... a novel. Indeed, sometimes he seems to think of each individual volume as a separate novel, which may give us a clue. As for autobiography, he does use real names, which is part of the uproar over this volume. He is accused not only of involving real people in his own personal story but of revealing potentially embarrassing personal facts about them as ...”

“... imply that a writer’s first novel began to be worked on more or less from the time he was born may seem a very ordinary idea indeed. However that may be, I can’t go back so far, and only feel inclined to because the exercise might illuminate what I have to say later. The cinema was not the only influence in those early ...”

“... Augustine considers the plight of a judge. A judge in attempting to discover the truth of a crime may put a man to torture. What if the man dies under torture; or, unable to bear the pain, confesses to the crime though he is innocent? And what of his accusers? They may sincerely have wished to bring criminals to ...”

“... are all possibilities. The only known reader of the new work is Salinger’s son, Matthew, but he may have been joined by Salinger’s widow, Colleen, and possibly by his literary agent and by a few editors at Little, Brown, the publisher of the original four books. Or maybe not; maybe at this stage it stops with the widow and the son, or even just the ...”

“... a two-bedroom flat in Shepherd’s Bush. In the early 20th century, Jane Martinson writes in You May Never See Us Again, identical twins tended to be ‘treated almost as a single entity’. David and Frederick would often dress in matching clothes, a habit they retained for most of their lives. Surviving stories from their early years seem cherry-picked to ...”

“... formal shape to the very different poem that goes, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to but they do’), I began to realise the flexibility as well as the power and memorability of good ‘formal’ verse. And when, after many months of cajoling, I got Tim to show me some of his own poems – he had not at the time published a book ...”

“... and stained glass or building. Some chapters appear to be more ‘original’ than others, but it may also be the case that the information is less generally familiar. ‘Technical’, ‘specialist’ or ‘original’ are relative and even arbitrary terms. Less relative is the conclusion that the systematic investigation into the holdings of Oxford and ...”

“... than the appearance it presents on the table,’ she concedes that since ‘dine we must ... we may as well dine elegantly.’ She is not backward with advice about purely ornamental pastries and jellies, and shows a certain nostalgia for the fabulous desserts of Georgian times: ‘if there be any poetry at all in meals, or the process of feeding, there is ...”

“... issues. They agree that US quasi-imperial supremacy is a ‘bubble’, a semblance that may have overawed the globe during a period of disoriented transition, but never derived from American military or economic power alone. It depended on the absence or indifference of the US’s earlier foes, Russia and China, plus the collusion of its former ...”

“... we come to this novel hoping to spend time with someone usually so mercurial and interesting, we may be aghast to find him taking himself so seriously. We look for the angle, but there is none. We expect the novel to crack up, to corpse, but it keeps a dismayingly straight face. Puzzlement may then turn to ...”