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“... as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil wash. One of those long summer days, my friend David and I got caught after stealing powdered floor cleaner from the local supermarket and pouring a huge mound of it in a doorway. The manager went in search of our mothers and made them pay for our strange artwork. They brought buckets, ...”

“... James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass audience. James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother thing. Perhaps George Raft came close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about ...”

“... can’t give the impression of looking inside a mind directly, and must find its own equivalents. David Lean declared that in The Passionate Friends (1949) he had succeeded in photographing thought, though he was referring not to the film as a whole but to one sequence, in which Claude Rains’s character jumps to the conclusion that his wife is having an ...”

“... red satin pants she had sewn were probably the least of her efforts. Doris’s father, William, held himself apart from all that. He seems to have been a silent, cold man – barely present to his children and wife. He taught music and gave voice lessons, conducted a choir and played the organ at the local Catholic church, although he was forced to give ...”

“... a welcome end to their journey. ‘There was great joy to see the land,’ the Baptist preacher David George recalled. ‘The high mountain, at some distance . . . appeared like a cloud to us.’ They had retched and ached through seven weeks of storms and pernicious fevers at sea. Now they raised three cheers and fired a salute. Their British officers ...”

“... sense of timing: aware of the failure of premature uprisings in Europe during World War Two, he held back his forces from insurrection against the Japanese and the French. Yet when the moment came he acted with decision: he entered Hanoi in late August – the first time he had ever set foot in the city – and proclaimed independence on 2 September. It was ...”

“... and Lord Justice Sales (who had been standing counsel to the government when at the bar) – had held on cogently reasoned grounds that the prior authority of an Act of Parliament was required. Nevertheless the Supreme Court sat in full, all 11 members, to hear what even the sober Constitution Unit was calling the case of the century. Well, the appeal ...”

“... would produce a comprehensive report of its visit for the First Zionist Congress which was to be held in Basel in August that year. Bentwich was well-to-do, Western European and religious. Herzl and most early Zionists were chiefly interested in helping the impoverished and persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, but Bentwich was more worried about the number of ...”

“... is not kind. After she became famous, Sontag would compare herself to Dorothea in Middlemarch, held back by Casaubon. At the time, she wrote: ‘I have been cast in the role of husband killer à la Dorothea Brooke Casaubon.’ As the diaries proceed, Sontag and Rieff turn up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they dine with his new colleagues from ...”

“... Chekhov’s irony is often savage, modern irony is often merely all-nullifying. It says much for David Bezmozgis’s considerable talents that his apparently skinny, crafty, ironic stories, narrated entirely in the first person in simple, unmetaphorical prose, and fond of abrupt closures, should seem to dip so obviously into the common pool and yet avoid, on ...”

“... swiftly, with the minimum of bureaucracy – a security official in a British port can use a hand-held device to get information that a person entering the UK is of interest to the authorities in a member state – but subject to proper legal process. May said her judgment, as home secretary, was that ‘remaining a member of the European Union means we will ...”

“... disasters, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley’s diligent gofer, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds as high-ups in British intelligence, all candidates for the ultimately declared position of mole – and the director’s elegant hand is everywhere. Tomas Alfredson is best known for his bleak vampire movie Let the Right One In, and ...”

“... The most enthusiastic moment came when David Cameron promised to end poverty and pronounced the Tories the real party of the poor. The Conservatives have, of course, always thought themselves the real party of the poor but this time the claim was accompanied by some genuine rhetoric about inequality which they may come to regret ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”