“... the day should not prevent him from dancing at Annabel’s during the night. As an attitude it may be defensible, but it led to a certain amount of mistrust and it contributed to some unreliable journalism. Hitchens in America is recognisably the same creature as he was in Britain, but his range is wider, his writing is more sensitive and his judgments are ...”

“... mosques. Below, at the foot of the Western Wall of the Second Temple, the Orthodox pray; they may not set foot on the Mount itself. In this city the most palpable fake and the most obvious bit of tourist razzmatazz acquires some mythical resonance. Incidentally, it is remarkably beautiful and has a benign winter climate; these qualities no doubt enhanced ...”

“... climate, our deafening present’ to European traditions resulted in a realist tradition which may turn out to be America’s greatest contribution to 19th and 20th-century painting. Professor Novak’s book is fascinating because she sets about showing how the work of the prolific and confident landscape painters of the mid-1800s can be related to ...”

“... per cent repetition of the same item is the optimum condition for a text (in part of one case this may be right – ‘Never, never, never, never, never’ – but that tells us nothing about how we judge the conditions of its rightness). All Nash can offer is that for some of the conflicting effects aptness to topic is a possible explanation. Sometimes we ...”

“... that the first mummies were natural, accidental products of sun and sand and dry air. Mystery may have attached itself to the uncorrupted body found in the desert. Some very early burials have been found dismembered. Considering the myth that the evil Seth cut up the body of his brother Osiris to prevent his resurrection, it is hard to suppose that the ...”

“... at Highgate Cemetery, and that when his lover departed he was unable to sew on his own buttons. I may, of course, have been misled to some extent, because Schmidt talks of ‘imaginary landscapes’. However, in Desert of the Lions, which he published in 1972, he certainly describes a visit to a real place, the Mexico he once knew but where he now feels ...”

“... to invert and destabilise conventional thought, yet just as paradox is a rhetorical device which may be imitated and conventionally deployed, so, too, perverse sexuality is an assumed role rather than a revelation of authenticity. Dollimore’s book is part of a movement in gay gender studies that questions the essential fixity of sexual oppositions and ...”

“... as ‘music: a system of organised sounds which give pleasure, and obey’ – ‘obeying’ may include ‘flouting’ – ‘the conventions of its grammar’? The organisation of pop music is imperceptible to me, its grammar foreign, and its pleasures non-existent. I readily concede that this is not the experience of everyone. The phenomenon is ...”

“... when Q supervised Leavis’s PhD thesis on ‘the relationship of journalism to literature’. One may wonder what these supervisions can have amounted to, even allowing that Q came to his Regius Chair from a life in literary journalism. Leavis was certainly critical of Q for not having been firmer with the Faculty in the matter of his appointment: yet he ...”

“... or deferral. He sat tightly contained on the far side of his big desk. He was pale. Alarmed. He may have been a priest. Tears poured down my face. I told him of my mother’s outlandish little red car coat. He was not a chaotic person. A large feeling of cul-de-sac filled the room. Beyond that I can recover only a few mental screenshots of me speaking about ...”

“... can make an immediate difference. The most chilling moment on election night was hearing Theresa May, when asked what she now wanted a Conservative government to do that it had been prevented from doing by having to work with the Lib Dems in coalition, answer that her first priority was to pass legislation that would empower the security forces and the ...”

“... a portrait of blindness, or of seeing without seeing. Even the wonderful last frames of the film may leave us there. Shand is shut up in the kidnappers’ car, a gun trained on him. Apart from occasional glances at the gunman’s face, the camera just watches Shand in close-up for more than two minutes. At first he seems to grin in a troubled fashion, ready ...”

“... get into trouble for knowing as well as not knowing, even if the trouble is different. And that it may not matter what ain’t so as long as everyone else thinks the way you do. Michael Lewis, in the book the movie is based on, calls ‘not knowing’ a ‘talent’. ‘Their ignorance seems incredible,’ he says. ‘They’ in this case are traders who ...”

“... someone. They pick on a companion (Aneurin Barnard) who hasn’t yet spoken and so, they think, may be a German in disguise. ‘He doesn’t speak English – or if he does it’s with an accent thicker than sauerkraut sauce.’ The man turns out to be French, which makes him, if anything, more dispensable. The symbolically named Tommy (Fionn ...”

“... that is why this film qualified for government support. Well, that and its air of dissent that may confuse the West. Leviathan is Russia’s official selection for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. The drinking is symptomatic of a deeper, bewildered hopelessness. Other symptoms are scarcely controllable rage, and reckless misbehaviour that can only lead to ...”