“... haughty, headstrong creature! I own I did not like her, after her infancy was past.’ These words may make us like Nelly less, and the possibility is taken up in Fennell’s film.When Heathcliff returns, Cathy is married to Edgar. All is peaceful (if uninspired) and we get to admire Isabella’s artwork: painting, wallpaper, a doll’s house. Rather ...”

“... Victorian critic lay directly behind her own aesthetic of scrupulous watchfulness. Such insights may indeed be valuable, but what Tomlinson’s recollections most touchingly convey is the elegiac mood already referred to. Miss Moore’s anxiety that her visitor should approve of New York (‘I was afraid you wouldn’t like it – it’s gotten so ...”

“... thought, and protested forcibly against, so many things that the critic has to protect himself. He may know a lot about the first generation of European Communists but less about paper-making or indigo or Victorian business management – Morris being one of the pioneers of a ‘house style’. In spite of this, all the emphasis today is on his wholeness. In ...”

“... has conducted a survey of the nation’s reading habits. After questioning 291 people (you may not think that’s very many out of 60 million, but the interviews were ‘in-depth’ and ‘face-to-face’), they have reached various intriguing conclusions. Having decided that excitement is the best measure, they found that 77.3 per cent of those ...”

“... uncalled for in the days of the painted portrait – dark glasses or a raised newspaper – may be thrown up. Privacy laws could change things, but for many years celebrities have fought attacks on the integrity of the image with yet more pictures of the approved kind.Photographers who can produce them – who can make faces interesting and desirable ...”

“... on the distant view of Miss Provis at her easel, her peacock train supported by naked graces. You may well recognise Reynolds in the foreground, rising from the grave with his ear trumpet, but you should also know that Edward Malone, his biographer, said that, were he alive, Reynolds would have subscribed to Miss Provis’s method. The flying, farting putto ...”

“... to what might be thought the most odd, hermetic, esoteric and in-your-face new work. Some visitors may reckon they are visiting a freak show, a playroom or a chamber of horrors, but their refusal to accept that they are in the presence of art minimises the debilitating self-importance a gallery exhibition tends to force on even the most subversive work. The ...”

“... proclamation of reforms), is the one picture in the exhibition that connects clearly with what may be the most famous of all Russian pictures: Repin’s own Barge Haulers on the Volga of 1870-73, reproduced in the catalogue but perhaps not allowed to leave Russia. The belief some Russian artists had in the possibility of a Modernism that was popular – an ...”

“... Rodrigo Moreno’s​ The Delinquents has taken a while to reach us. Its premiere was at Cannes in May 2023. The fate of the film imitates, in a way, its main theme. It’s about getting lost, or not getting lost enough. It has been described as a heist movie and a comedy. These labels are appropriate only if every bank robbery is a heist, and if we call films comedies when we can’t think of another word to describe them ...”

“... a warm, amusing, dancing person. Arabuli manages both roles and the transition wonderfully. People may disappear in Istanbul, but Akin’s film suggests they reappear in other guises, more tolerant and humane than the ones they grew up with. Lia finally concedes that Tekla didn’t fail her family, they failed her. ‘We only cared about what people would say ...”

“... crime against divinity. Our idea of what such figures look like and how disappointing the reality may turn out to be is a large part of the myth. Another large part is our idea of ourselves. In the novel, Shelley gives us a wonderful hint of this through her use of the word ‘became’. Victor doesn’t say ‘when my father got married and had a ...”

“... Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist ...”

“... the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident. You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture. (For example, the idea of penis envy, as Simone de ...”

“... to spirit of conversation, but I at the same time think the process of modulation and inflection may be quite as complete, or more so, without the external enunciation; and that an author had better try the effect of his sentences on his stomach than on his ear. This is Hazlitt’s way of avoiding claptrap; he’s pleased, for instance, that Shakespeare ...”

“... a strange paradox if narrative and history turned out to be incompatible. But the example of Homer may teach us not to take the paradox too tragically. The Iliad has a climax, the fall of Troy, but it has many perspectives, and it would be a drastically impoverished reading of Homer’s epic that saw as its ‘point’ an explanation of Troy’s fall. The ...”