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“... as Austen herself did, when we know that the effect on other people is most often negligible at best and at worst deleterious, has never gone away. The correct answer today is that we dress for ourselves, but that isn’t quite true either. We dress to say something about ourselves and the question is: to whom are the remarks addressed? They can be, indeed ...”

“... some of this quality from its being made so by its participants, who were, after all, some of the best writers of the period. It may not be easy to gauge the documents of an age that invented such brilliant documentaries, and whose novelists pretended to be a Camera.Take one of Carpenter’s best stories, Auden’s marriage ...”

“... only talking about myself. In any case, with the whole topic so charged and so difficult, it is best to begin with the agreed facts. The climate of our planet is not stable. The whole of recorded human history has taken place within what is, from the earth’s point of view, a relatively narrow band of temperature. From a glaciological perspective, we are ...”

“... Portraits afford many opportunities for the exercise of this kind of discretion, since they are best regarded not as simple reproductions of objects in the painter’s visual field but rather as presentations (as well as representations) of the sitter to the spectator: in other words, as documents of what the late Erving Goffman used to call ‘impression ...”

“... Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and psychological, in which his generation grew up in Britain: What attracted me then about Camber was less its whispering billows of sand and wheeling black-headed gulls ... [than] the relics of the war that still ...”

“... century there were Caravat and Shanavest pubs, wren-boys, mummers’ teams, songs and dance tunes. Nicholas Hanley, chief of the Caravats, was a flamboyant dandy who strutted about with a blunderbuss and brace of pistols, returned to his plundered victims any items he thought it beneath his dignity to pocket, and ostentatiously threw his elegant cravat to the ...”

“... And by doing so, these critics proved it was so. They wrote as if Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray et al were as sophisticated and as consistent in their styles, worldviews, personal ‘signatures’ as, say, William Faulkner – and thanks to Cahiers, few cinephiles would today think of disputing that. They were, however, less successful in their ...”

“... the happiest of his relationships with a major director, though he did remarkable work for Nicholas Ray (Born to Be Bad, On Dangerous Ground), Fritz Lang (Clash by Night) and Jean Renoir (The Woman on the Beach). Lieutenant Benson is fighting in Korea because he has to, and the progress of his platoon is by inches, through a mined road and enemy ...”

“... Sir​ Nicholas Henderson was British ambassador almost everywhere that mattered – Bonn, Paris, Washington. He met all the great personalities of the second half of the 20th century. Yet in conversation he reverted, time and again, to the few years he spent in his twenties as assistant private secretary to Ernest Bevin ...”

“... state of inner juices, though that is the sedimented meaning.The brain as computer: is this the best we can do? The computer is so obvious; we spend so much of our days touching it, melding our minds with it. The premodern imagination was more ambitious. From ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, men and women looked into the fire or up at the sky to ...”

“... are one reason (Blade Runner is another) why Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? remains Dick’s best-known book, despite the baldness of its prose: ‘“Do you think androids have souls?” Rick interrupted.’ Do Androids? is also a book about authentic feeling, about how and when we can trust our emotions. Deckard and his wife own a ‘mood ...”

“... to the point of eccentricity’. Certainly that is the reputation which has stuck to his best-known predecessor, Henry George. In his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty, George set out the same thumping principle which inspires Linklater: ‘The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political ...”

“... lately comes up frozen quite stiff.This love of chaos, motion, process, which is the energy of his best poems, and often makes them resemble action paintings, is brought to a halt by the strong stresses on the last three words so that the stretched perception is completed. And there is a heightened exultation in chaos in a much later letter (23 October ...”

“... so quiet.’ ‘Just hanging on,’ Armstrong replied, ‘and punching.’ It was Collins who best described the three men: they were ‘amiable strangers’, never close. Aldrin was known as Dr Rendezvous for his habit at parties of droning on about the technical detail of the lunar module, named Eagle, for the Apollo 11 mission, and the way it would ...”