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“... The devil is in the detail, they say, and this is certainly the case with the films of Robert Bresson. And if the devil is there, God can’t be far away. Or can he? These are very curious details, bits of the real but not part of any attempt at realism, pieces of a puzzle that may not even exist. Feet, legs, hands, sand, straw, mud, laceless old shoes; dulled or hallucinating faces staring past the camera at some lost version of infinity; countless shots of the backs of persons walking away from us, or figures whose heads are out of the frame most of the time; sound effects that threaten to take over the whole movie; an old tweed suit that moves us far more than the fake blood on a man’s face; passing cars that are more interesting than a couple going through the motions of an embrace in the foreground; acting that is not so much unprofessional as non-existent, a mere reciting of lines from a too perfectly written book ...”

“... painted around the time of William’s death in 1663 and commissioned either by him or his son Robert. Having existed in obscurity for centuries (on its donation to Norwich Castle Museum, the last owner warned: ‘the painting is very faded, of no artistic value, only curious from an archaeological point of view’), it is now the subject of a huge ...”

“... that push us to say different things. We have for example to consider diseases that radically alter personality. People have divorced on the grounds that ‘this isn’t the person I married,’ and one doesn’t need to be unwell to feel what Henry James felt, writing to Rhoda Broughton in November 1915 after she had praised one of (what he called) his ...”

“... 1960s) and many of the same locales in New York and New Jersey. Events in 4321 never drastically alter the personality of any character, and in any case personality is always, in this book, subservient to circumstance. And that’s perfectly fine. Auster has never been interested in psychological realism. His best work is spare, structurally ...”

“... This is the first volume of a projected three-volume ‘definitive’ biography of Robert Graves by his nephew, Richard Perceval Graves. It takes over where the author’s father, Robert’s younger brother John Graves, left off. John, who died in 1980, had been described by Robert as a ‘typically good pupil of a typically good school’ (to which he returned as teacher); he had for long contemplated the composition of a book called My Brother Robert ...”

“... his twenties and early thirties, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows the author’s alter ego forming around predicaments of positioning: where does he stand in relation to everything else? He is centre stage in the story his father tells him in the opening lines of the book but then hides under the table as his mother and aunt demand apologies ...”

“... the probation service, at a cost of about half a billion pounds. Raab’s immediate predecessor, Robert Buckland, sacked in the reshuffle of 15 September, was one of the last cabinet ministers who voted Remain in the EU referendum, so did well to survive as long as he did. He was a proper criminal barrister, practising for almost twenty years before becoming ...”

“... quality helps to account for the powerful, painful oppressiveness of the book, as Polly Alter becomes more and more deeply enmeshed in her quest for the eponymous woman she is pursuing. For Polly is engaged in writing a biography of Lorin Jones, a painter who died some twenty years before the quest begins. Polly has recently become divorced, has a ...”

“... life as surely as weddings and funerals, he proves his case by making his will-o’-the-wisp of an alter ego more than ordinarily susceptible to the winds of change. Roland is a bundle of nerves. In 1986, not everyone trembled at rumours that the government was lying when it said radiation had settled in the North-West not the South-East, queued up fruitlessly ...”

“... were some English friends; whom I had got to know in Vienna and also my girlfriend, Else. Soon alter this dinner my innocent friendship with Else came to an end. Her family discovered that I was taking her to a restaurant when she made out that we were going to a cinema. Apparently it was wicked for an unmarried girl to dine alone with a man, and Else was ...”

“... uncertainty principle is often taken to mean that whenever you measure something, you alter it. In the everyday world, you can usually set this aside: I don’t worry about the effect of the speedometer on how fast my car’s wheels turn or on how its engine runs. You can’t ignore it, though, in economic life. As Charles Goodhart argues, if a ...”

“... a journey through time and never came back, and the final battle (or life itself) was too much for Robert Downey Jr (Iron Man). The last scene but one is his funeral, and the last scene of all is a glimpse of an aged Chris Evans (Captain America), who has had better luck, and is living with his old sweetheart retrieved from the 1970s. On the soundtrack we hear ...”

“... theatrical staging, a tableau vivant, which cannot but call to mind the ‘theatre of cruelty’, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, scenes from David Lynch movies. This brings us to the crux of the matter. Anyone acquainted with the US way of life will have recognised in the photographs the obscene underside of US popular culture. You can find similar ...”

“... found a suitable home, when the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing opened. The space, designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, isn’t quite the ecclesiastical setting for which the artwork was made, but it comes surprisingly close: high ceilings with simplified apses, top-lighting and pale grey walls with dados made of grey pietra serena. Almost ...”

“... the process of myth-making, and the psychological and literary needs that process served. Though Robert Browning especially would have resisted the idea, the Brownings’ courtship seems ideally suited to our current preoccupation with the priority of language over experience. These were lovers who read long before they saw one another, who admired writing ...”