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“... ponderousness of his new work, Eyes Wide Shut, must have forgotten what the other films were like. Vincent LoBrutto, from whose biography (Faber, 1998) I’ve borrowed the above quotation, inadvertently sums up a whole career when he says: ‘Stanley Kubrick didn’t take vacations.’ We could sum up the master’s film style by saying: ‘Stanley Kubrick ...”

“... commerce between them can begin. Brevity acquired new powers, allied to quickness and lightness. Paul Valéry described Voltaire’s contes as ‘those peerless miracles of rapidity, energy and terrible fantasy … nimble and cruel works, where satire, opera, ballet and ideology are joined in an irresistible rhythm’. Some of the Penguin contes seem locked ...”

“... little man, with a staccato, military manner’, according to the historian of psychoanalysis Paul Roazen. He spent his life championing Freud, but even Freud described him as ‘a disagreeable person, who wants to display himself in ruling, angering and agitating’, and referred to him once as ‘the liar from Wales’. Still, it’s possible that it ...”

“... with the new leader by pointing out ‘his chair’ when visitors came to the Crossman casa in Vincent Square. I doubt that even Widmerpool would have gone that far, but it’s easy to imagine him stressing, as did Crossman the intellectual populist, that ‘without any affectation’ Wilson ‘prefers the kind of unassuming, comfortable home life which he ...”

“... Wanger had started work on a follow-up to Blockade, adapted by Lawson from the journalist Vincent Sheean’s memoir, Personal History. The hero – Fonda again – witnesses fascist brutality while covering the war in Spain; later, in Germany, he is repelled by Nazi anti-Semitism, rescues several Jews from persecution and marries a Jewish woman. Breen ...”

“... of Being and Immortality are basically the sexual biographies of Tomás, Tereza and Sabina, of Paul and Agnes and Laura and Bernard and Rubens – whose sex life (Kundera does love his taxonomies) goes through five phases, from ‘the period of athletic muteness’ to something called (coyness is also of the process) ‘the mystical period’. Slowness ...”

“... malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of ...”

“... Drugs return Dustan to the realm of pure sensation: I don’t think I don’t think about Vincent and how the condom broke last year, how there was blood, and how three months later he tested positive. I don’t think about how I’ve been waiting to die for seven years. In this euphoric present, everything seems like a good idea and an absolute ...”

“... MSPs are ‘body swerving’ all attempts to break the deadlock. An exception is the Labour MSP Paul Sweeney, who has campaigned energetically for a resolution. He thinks that the GSA itself might now be willing to hand over the rebuild, but fears ‘nobody has the gumption to take it on.’ As well as mentioning Notre-Dame he makes a more telling if ...”

“... and beat him into signing a statement accusing his mother. Her authority is ‘the historian Vincent Cronin, writing in 1974’ – close to source, then. The effect of the accusations, brought out in open court, was to swing some sympathy Antoinette’s way, at least in the public gallery. That didn’t, of course, influence the verdict. It was a show ...”

“... with ‘the civilising coloniser’. Forty years after Fanon, in The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy tilted the idea of double consciousness towards a more elastic, miscegenated doubleness, proposing that cultures ostensibly defined by ethnicity – and divided historically as slaver and slave, coloniser and colonised, white and Black – are not ...”

“... less than three months after the downing of Flight 103, the then secretary of state for transport, Paul Channon, had lunch with some journalists. He talked, indiscreetly, of the brilliant detective work undertaken by the smallest police force in the country. Arrests, he told the journalists, were imminent. Although such conversations are customarily regarded ...”

“... of Sea Power upon History (1890), we might stress the derring-do of the Royal Navy, or – as Paul Kennedy did recently – the role of public finance. Brewer concentrates on organisational factors, and isolates three that were crucial. First and foremost, Britain’s army and navy trebled in size in the century after the Glorious Revolution. By the ...”

“... cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of Bristol: ‘In your memorable diaries you quote Disraeli’s view of May 1881, a month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about my ...”