“... R.W. Burchfield and John Sykes) is comparatively stable. When work began on the new Collins, Paul Procter and Della Summers were young conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins when he had finished a somewhat similar job for Hamlyn. Both Urdang and ...”

“... To Have and Have Not, which had been poorly reviewed on publication in 1937. Its central figure, Harry Morgan, is a brave failure who loses an arm and gets screwed by the rich. No, that’s not the movie, but Warners persuaded Hawks that it could be another Casablanca, with a café, vague conflict with the fascists, a resourceful lone operator, and some kind ...”

“... submerged his extraordinary sensitivities and artistry in the lives of Everyman characters like Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom and, even so, he filled a life like Rabbit’s with plenty of not very mundane drama: serial family abandonment, accidental infanticide, free love, death by house fire, alcohol and drug addiction, business ...”

“... works lurk (a Henry Moore? another Epstein?). In a shot that is, cinematically speaking, pure Harry Potter, a statue of St George and dragon floats in mid-air without its plinth, then is gone in a twinkle of computer-generated lens flare. In fact, some of the best and strangest moments in Starling’s film, ones that make subsequent strolls through the ...”

“... least a foothold in the establishment they were criticising: in the words of Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson, these were not rebellious outsiders but ‘young men questioning a system they had been trained to lead’ and laughing at ‘the society that had reared them’.The four cast members of Beyond the Fringe soon decamped to New York, where the revue ...”

“... the Cambridge collection, contains 942 letters written by Lawrence in something under five years. Harry T. Moore’s Collected Letters of 1962 did the whole job in less than twice as many pages, though it’s true he didn’t print quite everything; and many more letters have turned up over the last twenty years. They are still turning up: this volume ...”

“... no means contemptible) satisfying certainties of an energetic material life. Mr Mo’s painter, Harry O’Rourke, an unsuccessful ex-rival to Gainsborough, remarks that an artist should use all the techniques that previous practitioners of his art have developed, and Mo’s own re-creation of the life of Canton and its environs between 1833 and 1841 carries ...”

“... English or Anglo-Saxon people feel that they ought to show towards the conclusiveness of death (Harry Truman’s remark when he heard of the death of Stalin, ‘I’m always sad when I hear of the passing of an acquaintance of mine,’ was in this sense typical) is not usually shared by the more cynical and abrupt French – ‘un emmerdeur de ...”

“... a framed still from a favourite film, A Hard Day’s Night; an essay by Eula Biss referring to Paul McCartney and ‘Norwegian Wood’; McCartney sporting a man bun during his lockdown vacation; rave reviews for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various ...”

“... There’s​ a scene in Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies (2010) in which a science teacher called Mr Farley talks about the word ‘amphibian’. He says that it refers to an organism able to survive both on land and in water, and that it comes from the Greek for ‘double life’. Though you would be hard-pressed to draw a clean analogy, Murray surely qualifies as an amphibious writer: funny and cerebral, brilliant at an improbable range of things and driven by a desire to upset perceived dichotomies ...”

“... and trusted adviser. London Can Take It (1940), his first notable wartime documentary, made with Harry Watt, is in many ways typical ‘spirit of the Blitz’ propaganda. Intended for release in the still-neutral US, its commentary pays stock tribute to the doughty residents of the British capital, but the film also has distinctive Jennings touches. It ...”

“... studios on the site of the former Leavesden aerodrome at Abbots Langley – they’re now home to Harry Potter World. How can knobbly Knebworth House, which looks as though it’s built of papier-mâché, compete? In 1843 Edward Bulwer-Lytton had the Tudor manor house remodelled – in Pevsner’s words – as a ‘romantic paraphrase of the Gothic ...”

“... Thank you for keeping still,’ Elizabeth Taylor says to Paul Newman at the end of the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Taylor’s character is thanking Newman for not saying anything when he hears her lying about being pregnant. But ‘Thank you for keeping still’ is also a good summary of Newman’s acting style, especially in his early films, when the main thing required of him was that he display his magnificent torso and his dazzling blue eyes for the audience to drink in their full manly beauty ...”

“... the fetish of modern Dickensian veneration and are reproduced with extraordinary redundancy. Harry Stone’s makes the fifth set of the working notes for Edwin Drood. His is the most attractive set by far, but not even the most finicky Dickensian could claim that on the face of it there is a crying need for an edition de luxe of these materials. The ...”

“... doing it but in knowing how shabby it is. The novel is narrated by one Palfrey, usually known as Harry, although that, of course, is not his name – long-time legal adviser to British Intelligence. Harry has his problems too, his little list of human failures, a pointless marriage and a mistress who scorns him. But then ...”