“... the movie keep wondering where God is and why he isn’t doing more to help them. God’s answers may not reach the questioners but we definitely get them, transmitted through an epigraph from the Book of Job (‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?’), a sequence of graphics (lots of lava, oceans, shots of the edges of the earth taken ...”

“... commanders, traders and amateur sleuths collected objects and relics from the area: signs of what may have become of the lost men. Handkerchiefs, soap, sponges, slippers, combs, forks and spoons were all brought back. One of the ships sent out after Franklin, the HMS Resolute, itself became trapped in the ice. Timbers from its hull were later retrieved and a ...”

“... a man whose hair has been carefully uncombed before almost every appearance he makes. But then we may feel that both men are equally helpless in these digital times: cool smiles and scruffy bewilderment carry the same message. The French word for digital – numérique – is repeated again and again in the movie, and it carries implications that are very ...”

“... created more of the same. The distances these stones travelled were huge: pebbles on the beach may originally have been pieces of a rock hundreds or even thousands of miles away (these are known as erratics). In a photograph taken in the early 1970s on Dunwich beach, I am standing on a large lump of masonry that has tumbled down from the top of the ...”

“... noticed at all. ‘We’ are black people in America and especially in the South; but the word may also call up everyone involved in the history and mythology of these matters, that is, most of us. If we learn how some people ‘have come to be seen’, we may learn something too about how we are ...”

“... law is what the Supreme Court says it is has both personal and constitutional ramifications which may take a long time to play out. More immediately, the legislation sponsored by Hilary Benn requiring the prime minister to ask the EU for an extension to Article 50 in the absence of an exit agreement before Halloween contains no enforcement mechanism. One ...”

“... enjoyment’) or insulting Joshua Reynolds (‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art’). A few may have been excited by the promise addressed to Christians at the top of one of the Jerusalem plates: I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball; It will lead you in at Heavens gate, Built in Jerusalems wall. The great Northrop Frye, in ...”

“... cult of celebrity which reaches its early maturity in Reynolds’s work, those first responses may also be our last.Celebrity portraits may have another more profound, or at least more dignified life as works of art, but our problem when we look at them in that way is the encroachment of the publicity images which ...”

“... is less of being in command than of being in pursuit.Once the hand leaves off, the marked surface may serve as a step in an inquiry or at least a historical record. We discard the sensation that originally held us gripped. Reversing that drift, the exhibition Drawing the Unspeakable at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne (until 27 April) points us back to mark ...”

“... done, the author explains lucidly and in considerable detail the operation of what to modern eyes may seem an essentially unacceptable system. Since the 19th century ushered in a new concept of public morality, many historians have found little to praise in the bribery and corruption of the Jacobean Court. And amongst the system’s beneficiaries few cut a ...”

“... indulgent notion of what a wayward 11-year-old is like, but they are wrong. Over the years William may have been surrounded by some wildly caricatured types, but he himself has remained a recognisable robust figure of flesh and blood, especially blood. If, as Orwell says, Billy Bunter is a first-class comic character, then how much more so is William. His ...”

“... likely to make successful prosecution a cinch; Maryland, where the death penalty was suspended in May, couldn’t compete. But in any case, there’s a strong sense that it’s all over bar the date of execution. Very possibly that’s all people are interested in. The support of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence did not make much difference to ...”

“... picture. It was probably Gainsborough’s friend Philip Thicknesse who wrote that his ‘pictures may not be said so properly to be like the originals as to be the people themselves’, and similar remarks were made about La Tour’s pastels. The critical language would be equally appropriate for a piece of legerdemain – which was, in a way, what the use of ...”

“... What on earth, you ask, is a scarith? Well, it is a sort of mud-piecrust package, which may be tubular in shape, containing in various layers documents of immense antiquity. What language is the word from? Apparently from ancient Etruscan, or Hetruscan, if stories about the grandeur of the Tuscan kingdom up to the time of Lars Porsena of Clusium are to be believed ...”

“... The self is not a world. If we don’t like this moral, or don’t believe in it, then we may want to reflect on the gap between the personal stories at the seaside and the impersonal disaster of the climate – which here plays the role of catastrophic history in other Petzold movies. The gap makes all serious connection implausible, but how can we ...”