“... ferry, no other life. Hunger and thirst after righteousness. More recently the American composer Richard Einhorn wrote an oratorio, Voices of Light, to accompany the Dreyer film. The piece is huge, composed for full symphony orchestra and chorus, and it engulfs the listener in rapturous, Messiah-like choruses, which cast Joan as the promised saviour, and ...”

“... How does​ Shakespeare look, after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Scenes of sexual coercion, from Richard III to Pericles, have become more immediate. In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s predicament – should she agree to sleep with Angelo, corrupt deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in order to save her brother from execution? – gets audiences on her side ...”

“... actually – which were called Freeman, Hardy and Willis – were trained by Barry’s brother, Richard, who showed David how to work with the birds himself. Everything had the appropriate size about it.’ Loach’s sense of ‘appropriate size’ remains to this day the key to his achievement as a filmmaker.Kes marked a conscious departure from the ...”

“... well as the non-hierarchical mode of composition that each devised. Mondrian strove to give equal weight to each element in his paintings while maintaining a unified whole, and so, in his way, did Newman; perhaps he insisted on their differences because they were close in this and other respects. In a sense theirs are ‘leaderless’ (an-arkhos) canvases ...”

“... colony. We have a programme and a list of guests. Jeremy Treglown is there, but where are Richard Gere and Bernardo Bertolucci? Where is Kurt Vonnegut? The bus sizzles along wet roads flanked by blackened chunks of Kendal Mint Cake and we debuss at the tiny Peredelkino church, where a service for Pasternak is to be held. The choir has not yet arrived ...”

“... by German botanists in Cameroon, its fruit yielded a much higher percentage of oil (50 per cent by weight compared to 15 per cent for the dura oil palms favoured in Africa). Oil palm plantations spread across Malaya and Sumatra in the 1920s, but the truly colossal growth began in the 1970s, first in Malaysia and then in Indonesia. In 1970, a hundred thousand ...”

“... and the cheap conceits, untying the absurd antitheses, toning down the gaudy lexicon, adding weight to the petty rhythms, painting everything white. The replacement of the early histories by ones written centuries after the events was not so much an exercise in historiographical recension as an act of translation. At all costs, Great Alexander had to be ...”

“... had asked Lévy to fix Juliet up with an English publisher, and believed he had written to Richard Bentley & Sons about the matter, no such letter from Paris survives in the Bentley archives (perhaps because Lévy objected to the idea and declined to act on it). The manuscript was lost, and so – more or less – was Juliet Herbert, until her ...”

“... of his personality, the orderly force of his background, the keenness of his ambition, his moral weight and shape: it might require a novelist like Dreiser to play with the psychic arithmetic which had brought the Massachusetts politician to this pretty pass. Kerry was a young man whose leadership instincts were so apparent at Yale that his friends used to ...”

“... approving of Charles, especially in the early years of his reign; and Johnson gives insufficient weight to the fact that panegyric was then a flourishing mode. Still, after the notably measured praise of the Heroic Stanzas in memory of Cromwell, Dryden does seem to have given himself over to acclaiming and defending the Stuart monarchs with a readiness that ...”

“... so tight, that hurt so in the pit of my stomach, was vanquished in the straining against her, the weight of her body on top of mine, the caress of her mouth and her hands.’ Now she is able to rebuke society from personal experience. Bisexuality, not heterosexuality, is the truth of the individual: it is ‘an honest rejection of the – yes – perversion ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”

“... and after 1914, and his sympathies for the abortive revolution of 1918-19: but he also gives full weight to the poet’s deep ‘Austrian’ distaste for everything ‘typically German’, especially for public life in the early days of the Weimar Republic. We read of Rilke’s admiration for T.G. Masaryk, the founder-president of Czechoslovakia, whose ...”

“... us: as he writes in Book 1 of My Struggle, ‘why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?’ If someone scans an item at a till, someone else must pay for it. If someone drinks coffee, they must later wash the cup. When Knausgaard mentions an off-ramp, he must actually merge into traffic: if he doesn’t inform us when he shifts into first, he ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”