“... 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 ...”

“... barons of parallel reality and fiscal mockery – Apple, Google, Amazon etc. Skinner’s bludgeon may be absent, his menu of reinforcements may be diluted but his intentions stretch from the grave. According to one of Norman Foster’s apparatchiks working on the Apple project, ‘We have a building that is pushing social ...”

“... that they were delivered to their parents slung from a beak isn’t wholly clear. The story may originate in Slavic mythology, where the stork carries unborn souls from Vyraj, a spring paradise, to earth. It’s also possible that mistaken identity is involved: in Greek myth, Hera transforms the Pygmean queen Gerana into a leggy long-beaked bird; Gerana ...”

“... so much a case to be resolved as an analytical parade.Saint Omer opens with a sequence that may be a dream, if we attribute its imagery to Rama (Kayije Kagame), one of the film’s two leading characters. She is a writer and lecturer who takes a train to sit in on a court case that she hopes will provide material for her next novel. Or if we don’t ...”

“... of Roland: the wise, steady friend standing up for the brilliant, wayward hero. The comparison may sound pretentious, but then Evans compares McEnroe to Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, with quotations from Shakespeare and from Peter Levi on Shakespeare. He uses adjectives like ‘pavonine’, and describes McEnroe’s style as pointilliste – rather a good ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... between the direction of time and directions in space, Hawking reassures his readers, who may at this point have had some difficulty in following him, by saying that ‘as far as everyday quantum mechanics is concerned, we may regard our use of imaginary time and Euclidean space-time as merely a mathematical device ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... diary which follows the candidate through two contests, from the summer of 2011 to the night of 6 May 2012 at the place de la Bastille where the future president of the Republic addressed an inaudible, impromptu speech to the crowd – ‘Be happy, be proud’ – and then retired for a few words with his entourage. ‘You ask yourself: will it last?’ he ...”

“... even if it goes wrong, and the other can’t really do idolisation, even if that is what it may be trying for. What Kapadia and his writer Manish Pandey seem to want first and last is a kind of low-key divinisation. The god is still a god, but also a humble fellow at heart, uncomplicated by success. There is nothing in the film to confirm this view ...”

“... the president on the dark and seedy streets of the wrong side of Washington says in language that may seem a little advanced for the 1860s: ‘Well, I’ll be fucked.’ Lincoln says: ‘I wouldn’t bet against it.’ The posters for the movie, its length (two and a half hours) and the general air of piety that surrounds Lincoln’s name lead us to expect ...”

“... the library’s thoroughfares, which are often bedlam. High-minded modernist ideas and aspirations may have driven Colin St John Wilson to design his building as he did, but it’s the unruliness of some who go there that makes it appealingly lived in. Study describes what goes on inside, obviously – except, and equally obviously, when it doesn’t – but ...”

“... and I said it was. She asked me if anything was the matter, and I denied it.’ His first novel may be thought to have furnished a model for the clifftop-to-shoreline murder site in le Carré’s 23rd. He was outshone by the blaze and sophistication of le Carré’s success. His friend’s discriminating treatment of the secret service was seen by him as a ...”