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“... There are whole pages off which one can feel the acne rise. Then he adds, piously: ‘My earnest hope ... is that this book should not be sexist.’ In fact, it is beyond sexism. A man who, with a perfectly straight face, can describe the photographer hero of Antonioni’s movie, Blow Up, as having ‘a corps of lovely cavorting dolly birds at his ...”

“... was going on, or when the Tories wrapped the Albert Hall in a blue ribbon, it was hard not to hope that our disdainful visitor was spending the day somewhere else. But where? On every side, there seems to be some Toytown farce in progress. What, for instance, would Gore make of Christine Hamilton? What would he make of Martin Bell? Too British to be ...”

“... children of the world, his eyes caged and hostile behind glass – still Péguy said that Hope is a little child. Violent contrariety of men and days; calm juddery bombardment of a silent film showing such things: its canvas slashed with rain and St Elmo’s fire. Victory of the machine! The brisk celluloid clatters through the gate; the cortège ...”

“... The early years of the Revolution saw one or two competent plays, such as Chénier’s Charles IX, but they were written along traditional lines. Laya’s excellent Ami des Lois – equally conventional in style – was suppressed by the Commune after only four performances, on political grounds. The theatre of the Terror was represented by such ...”

“... any endeavour, many with great skill and ability, can take justifiable Pride and will, I earnestly hope, feel that they will be sharing in the Honour conferred on me.’ Bradford. We film a medical room in a dye-works in Prague in 1910 set up in the empty stockroom of Downs, Coulter and Co, a textile merchants that closed down in 1974. On the wall is an ...”

“... back a long way, and perhaps the classic illustration is to be found in the 1870s with the case of Charles Marvin, who later established a considerable reputation as an author on the affairs of Europe and Central Asia. Contemporary critics praised his books about Russia and the East. Except by scholars, these works are long forgotten, but what is remembered is ...”

“... the source of Turner’s interest. Litter and debris are for him emblems of the fallacy of hope, intimations of mortality. Rubbish attracts him because it is the favour to which we must all come, the condition to which time will reduce even our most monumental achievements. As the sun sinks on Carthage, that proud city seems already to be dissolving ...”

“... pained) observer of Kipling’s idées fixes. He thought Bateman’s, which dated from the time of Charles I, an ‘oddly discordant setting for its owner’s furious modernism and journalism’. But it was one of Kipling’s talents not to be abashed by discordance. In a letter written for publication in Filson Young’s The Complete Motorist (1904), Kipling ...”

“... the loss of cultural memory are said to be the order of the day (an all too reductive idea), what hope is there for literary criticism which depends on remembrance and cultural knowledge? Steiner’s answer is deceptively simple: auctoritas. As a critic, Steiner believes ‘in the relations, as these were classically conceived, between words and ...”

“... code names in the computer, names relating to literature and philosophy, so that one is codenamed Charles Dickens, another Bertrand Russell. The killer is one of these: code name Wittgenstein. The trouble with such dead-clever stuff as this is that it wavers between seriousness and farce, and also that the cleverness makes more jarring the frequent lapses ...”

“... fluid along to safeguard his investment, intending to display the twins dead or alive. ‘I hope these will prove profitable as a curiosity,’ he wrote to his wife, Susan, who eventually undertook much of the daily work of managing the twins. Onlookers flocked to view the Siamese Twins and paid a high price – fifty cents or the equivalent – for the ...”

“... forced into a name change – it was banned by the French government for insulting the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. In a remarkable essay published in the Nouvel Observateur Roussel made two essential points. The first concerned French foreign policy: I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of the dead as heroes. It usually happens because ...”

“... trying to convert the knots and twists of Russian and French sentences into intelligible and, I hope, fluent English; I’ve also translated books and articles. On the one hand, ‘You talk – I talk’; on the other, ‘You write – I write.’ The translator has time to change, edit and refine his text. He also has a desk, entire shelves full of ...”

“... the centre of family life an in-built disappointment, an emotional investment in what is missing. Charles and Isobel in Human Croquet collect things belonging to their absent mother – a shoe, a powder compact, a lock of hair – but fail to make a life for themselves in the present. In the short story ‘Temporal Anomaly’, Marianne, who has been dead for ...”

“... After his suicide attempt, Lau turned to writing on financial matters, perhaps in the hope of persuading German princes to support freedom of religion on economic grounds. He continued to lament the failure of his radical writings, which he had published anonymously: ‘I have piped loudly and melodiously enough, but they did not want to ...”