“... There are texts that seem to require a certain craziness of us, a mismeasure of response to match the extravagance of their expression. But can a mismeasure be a match? All we know is that we don’t want to lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be Walter Benjamin’s wonderful remark about missed experiences in Proust: None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for ...”

“... The names of the actors appear briefly on a dark screen. We hear the sound of a car on a road. A title reads: ‘This film is based on a true story.’ Then we see a large American car from the back, driving at night on the wrong, that is, on the left side of the road. The car swerves into the right lane, the camera stays in the left, catches up, comes alongside the car ...”

“... If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’ ‘Like what we imagine knowledge to be ...”

“... adds up to something less than our old imagined intimacy. We knew them better before we knew them.Michael Ragussis says this scene is ‘the exact opposite’ of an apocalypse. ‘The poet is not exalted through vision. He escapes nothing except falsehood.’ I agree there is no exaltation here, but there is surely some sort of apocalypse – a ...”

“... was only one way to make it work – by getting the people who knew him talking. Andrew O’Hagan Michael Wood (film critic): Those working-class lads seemed to be everywhere in British films of the 1960s, grunting and sweating their way through the class system, using sex as a narrow and repressed form of guerrilla warfare. We are often told about the ...”

“... he was cautious to the last – have the sense of ‘being able to do what angels can’. James Wood writes: I have good reason to remember Frank Kermode’s collection of essays The Art of Telling, because it was the first book I ever stole. Between the ages of 16 and 18 I lifted more than a few books from shops. Resources were very slight, and the hunger ...”

“... can see most of his right shoulder, but only a little of his left) that at some point a strip of wood about two inches wide (the painting is on two oak panels) has been detached from the right-hand side. This is a pity, since it is just where we would expect the words ‘Aet. suae’ next to the sitter’s age, and maybe a small heraldic badge to indicate ...”

“... of the Semites.Eliot Weinberger’s recent books include What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. Michael Wood A New York Times reporter describes the ‘lethal tricks’ of Hamas in Gaza. I don’t doubt the existence of the tricks, but the implication is that the far more lethal directness of the Israeli attack is not only justified but morally ...”

“... ill and like getting old, who prefer winter to summer and autumn to spring’. These Babes in the Wood crave the rainy, stained and soggy. Yet the later Murdoch was a hard-line Tory, who may well have been liberal in her aesthetics but was hardly so in her politics. She had right-wing views on most topics, and lambasted the work of Derrida while having only ...”

“... wearing when captured. It’s a pity that they hadn’t had a chance to see the movie reviewed by Michael Wood on another page of this issue of the LRB, in which an outnumbered group of the military stood up a lot more robustly for the West in an earlier clash of civilisations: the Spartans at Thermopylae (the movie version of whose last stand is ...”

“... The Reader is a Holocaust drama laced with a coming-of-age narrative; Slumdog Millionaire, as Michael Wood said rather beautifully in the last issue, is about the ‘war on error’, revealing the desperate but ultimately triumphant lives of a group of poor children in modern Mumbai; Frost/ Nixon is about the showbusiness-ing of politics and about ...”

“... interesting thing about the writer in question. Often, though, this invented self is a problem. Michael Wood’s oustandingly brilliant new book is in part a corrective to the public persona adopted by his subject. Wood calls this persona ‘Nabokov the mandarin’, and robustly describes it as ‘a set ... of ...”

“... his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided ...”

“... but not an intraduisible in sight. As for the achievement of Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood in orchestrating the English edition, that qualifies as heroic. The French and English differ in certain important respects concerning both the choice of terms and the word order. The English has ‘philosophical lexicon’ where the French has ...”

“... more cagey than ‘eloquence’ can suggest. ‘Stealthy’ is another possibility – a word Michael Wood used in introducing the collection of Frank’s essays we published to mark his 90th birthday. But as I pile on the epithets I hear Frank’s voice in my head and I stop. Last February Frank gave a lecture at the British Museum – one of three ...”