“... when pushed, revises his estimate to 23. This would be a good score for the worst bandit, and it may be more shocking that the marshal is still guessing. But is anyone in the novel shocked? No, and least of all the 14-year-old Mattie Ross, who is looking for a man to help her find the man who killed her father. She has heard that Cogburn has ‘true ...”

“... as art. Avedon, he reported, had said: ‘You know, Peter – sometimes I think that Susan may be the enemy.’Of course, Hujar’s problem with Sontag may have been that she failed to mention him in On Photography. He tended to begrudge other photographers their fame or success, even snubbing Beaton and Arbus out of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them do struggle with the contradiction between the lure of celebrity and the sense that the cost may be too high even for people who like to pay steep prices. And those aren’t the only contradictions. The story of the discovery of a star has to have something of the fake about it when the actress playing the part is famous and long past being ...”

“... at a place or a room. An image printed from a bigger piece of film holds more information: you may, for example, be able to take a magnifying glass and read titles on the spines of books which would be too far away were you standing where the camera stood. Records of rooms and buildings made before miniature cameras became commonplace can have a ...”

“... have a tendency to roll over if they hit a fixed object, such as a guard rail. Market forces may cause industry to act where government has failed. Bradsher wrote last year that gas prices in the US would have to hit $2.50 a gallon and stay there for a while to have any negative impact on SUV sales. (A gallon of petrol in the UK costs $5.75, a figure ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the white art establishment treated black modernism as an oxymoron, or ignored it altogether. They may not have inhabited the same Paris Noir, but they shared a sense that their work had an inescapably public dimension. The woman depicted in Delaney’s Marian Anderson knows that her every move is politically consequential. Her lips ...”

“... or literature. The last is funny: the crowd at Taboo, the club where he reigned mid-decade, may have been camp and cutting and culturally savvy, but they weren’t noted for verbal wit, save for the doorman, Marc Vautier, who would direct unlucky punters to a mirror: ‘Would you let yourself in?’‘I have always thought about/staying in and going ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the glass of milk?’ Hitchcock asks, thinking of a famous moment in Suspicion where Cary Grant may or may not have poisoned Joan Fontaine’s evening drink. ‘I put a light in the milk.’ Truffaut responds: ‘You mean a spotlight on it?’ Hitchcock says: ‘No, I put a light right inside the glass because I wanted it ...”

“... used by the protagonist of my novel, a learned former Jew from the Yemen, Ka’b al-Ahbar, who may even have been a rabbi, and is said to have accompanied the Muslim Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab when he came to and conquered Jerusalem in 638. Jewish and Christian sources tell us nothing about Ka’b. The little we know comes from Islamic literature, in which ...”