“... watching the Investiture, people were more aware of the domestic than of the ceremonial aspect. He may have got it slightly wrong. It is the combination of the two which is fascinating: not the thought that the hero of the ceremony is just an ordinary person, but the thought that he is both – both human and god, both a hereditary monarch and the eldest of a ...”

“... renewing the vows of his poetic faith and pronouncing against old heresies. His position may sound embattled but we know that it is eminent. His aggravations have become his quirks, so that, for example, when he speaks of ‘the mindless sludge of surrealist verse’, we feel it to be less an expression of anger and revulsion than a reminder that in ...”

“... has to do not with whether there is a solution but with what to do about whatever solution one may find. This is a thriller after all, but a slow and easily distracted one. When we arrive, towards the end of the movie, at the provincial town which is the home of all these people, posse, victim, killer, we are surprised at its extent, the houses spilling ...”

“... checked the buddha out, and came back to enlarge his version. At Alton Towers in the 1980s (I may be misremembering) there were miniatures of the seven wonders of the world, alongside the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty and Saarinen’s arch in St Louis – and very fascinating they were, intricately modelled and quite embarrassingly enticing in their ...”

“... doing so. Secrecy jurisdictions raise revenue by collecting fees from registering companies. They may also charge fees for regulating the financial services industry located in their domain, and collect tax on the personal earnings of anyone working in that industry. In some locations, such as Jersey, taxes on the profits of banks comprise a significant part ...”

“... an actual dig. Their friend explains that where the archaeologists suspect there are bodies, or may once have been bodies, they pour liquid plaster into the ground through small holes, and allow it to solidify across the empty space into the shape of the bodies. They then brush away the soil to reveal not corpses but casts of corpses. As Alex and Katherine ...”

“... north Kent resort today – its decayed seafront and sad amusements – Duchamp’s presence there may seem absurd, his reassurance not entirely convincing. But the postcard he sent Bergmann shows the town in its prime: a place lately promoted from a staging post en route to Margate, with its radial streets confected as a genteel alternative to more garish ...”

“... the topic for us. When we see that the apparent leader of one of the gangs is also the sheriff, we may think of Leone’s Italy as it appears in so many legends and quite a bit of history. And in the fiction of Leonardo Sciascia and Michael Dibdin, where a crucial question about any crime is not who did it, but what to do with any knowledge you ...”

“... are here’) or the winding parallels in diagrams of library stacks. The book you are looking for may be so many up and so many along, but you are no closer to having it in your hand, much less being able to read it. It’s a mixture of phrenology and butchery. Even the labels make me feel squeamish and hopeless: ‘Another interesting finding is that the ...”

“... its chapters on the buildings of the city and on the learned men who lived there, although one may wish that he had allowed himself a little more space in his narrative chapters, where characters and places crowd in upon each other. Yet all four books have striking similarities. In the first place, they all have very considerable problems because of the ...”

“... politics, but it does surely mean that art has an urgent, exclusive attraction for her that it may not have for the rest of us, who like it but don’t live it. Another interesting moment in the film is less forgiving in this respect, but powerful all the same, carrying a message that may not be as simple as it ...”

“... of the body of Jeffrey Miller, shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State University in May 1970, with a pool of blood in the foreground. Kennard’s dyeline print bled red ink in the rain. He soon became a regular contributor to radical papers and magazines; the exhibition includes pages from the New Statesman, Socialist Challenge and ...”

“... says. ‘Not about God. Never about God. What he had lost his faith in was the Church.’ He may have lost a few other moral assets too, since we also learn that he conspired to discredit one of the likely candidates in the election that would take place after his death. He fired another potential successor in his last hours, too late for the dismissal ...”

“... looking for the ancient gifts of the dead to the living, without any concern for what the living may do with them, he now moves towards a religious respect for privacy – of the dead or anyone else. This could be because he thinks that he and Flora are the only people who have any right to worry about whether Beniamina is dead or not. It could also be the ...”

“... ovens, or Höss’s later promotion to commandant of commandants, but the possibility that Hedwig may have to leave the house (and garden and greenhouse) she loves so much. This is when we see Höss staring across the river again. His promotion requires the family to leave Poland and move to Oranienburg, near Berlin. It takes a week before he can bring ...”