“... that happens on the stage. A character who has lost a limb cannot do other than nurse the wound, no other discussion is possible. Not to acknowledge this makes the play, however brutal and seemingly realistic, a romantic confection. If there is pain there must be suffering. (But, it occurs to me, Gloucester in Lear?) Another topic concerning me at the moment ...”

“... submitted a design for a grand circus, culminating in a spiky, asymmetrical tower; it had no references to the style of the original gallery (a rather wan classicism), but tried to continue its use of civic, ceremonial approaches. The Prince of Wales, when Ahrends presented the project to him, wasn’t interested in ‘the plans, routes and squares we ...”

“... morals to aesthetics in a challenging new-old fashion. And it’s a question, as ever with John Banville, within other questions. Who, for instance, you’re made to wonder at this point in Ghosts, is actually asking? Some anonymous narrator? The author? The novel’s own enigmatic ‘evil man’, the one who does so much of its telling and, it turns ...”

“... absorb the poisons and the victims would then be reprieved, purified. Tituba and her husband, John Indian, also owned by Parris, prepared the witchcake under the supervision of a neighbour, who provided the recipe. Later, under questioning, Tituba said she had learned the recipe from ‘her mistress in Barbados’. In spite of their ancillary ...”

“... the best blood of England to waste itself in scaling hitherto inaccessible peaks?’ it demanded. No doubt such an ascent was magnificent. ‘But is it life? Is it duty? Is it common sense? Is it allowable? Is it not wrong?’ The sort of courage required of us in daily life was not to be acquired in a series of desperate adventures, by trying to emulate ...”

“... after the series of radio broadcasts Welles delivered during World War Two. It’s arguable that no one before Welles had addressed his countrymen in so many different ways. In his biographical memoir, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?, Joseph McBride depicts Welles as a multimedia dynamo who worked in ...”

“... In​ the original film noir, John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941), private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) visits criminal mastermind Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in his San Francisco hotel room to discuss the delivery of a mysterious ornament. The elevator attendant points him in the direction of Room 12c ...”

“... The British Recluse from 1722 (‘a sad Example of what Miseries may attend a Woman, who has no other Foundation for belief in what her Lover says to her, than the good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish ...”

“... yells Keezer. ‘A state of mind is a state of bliss! Extremism in the pursuit of bliss is no bummer! ... States of mind! States of bliss! Down with the states!’ Keezer, a dissident Vietnam veteran, always talks in this perky way. He imitates television performers: ‘This is your life. Terror tends to terrorise, absolute terror terrorises ...”

“... nor was it to be the last. Already, in 1825, the tall tower of William Beckford’s new baronial hall. Font-hill Abbey, had collapsed without warning. A few years after the Eglinton debacle, one of the day’s leading artists, William Dyce, was commissioned to paint allegorical frescoes on Arthurian themes in the Queen’s Robing Room in the new Houses of ...”

“... who presides over the ticket cage at a Bowery cinema, and the Rev. Mr James Jefferson Davis Hall, ‘the greatest and most frightening street preacher in the city’. There is the founder of Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People, where the exhibits include Theodore Roosevelt’s pith helmet and a parasol said to have belonged to the ...”

“... status of those who employed them but not as workers in their own right. They were expendable: no matter how friendly or kind the employer, no matter how mutual the dependence, servants knew that, when push came to shove, theirs was an unequal relationship built on cash not care. If a servant was unable to do her job for ...”

“... made glass) and their concentration in the centre of the façade, expressing, externally, the long hall, or portego, which is the defining feature of the plan of these buildings. Many have speculated that Venetian palaces are descended from Byzantine or late antique building types that were forgotten, ignored or unknown elsewhere in Europe; there are similar ...”

“... or more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the novel its title, the name of the ...”

“... A couple of nights before I first saw the Richter show at Tate Modern I had been at the Festival Hall listening to Boulez conduct his Pli selon pli. I felt then, as the octogenarian directed us through his atrocious and wonderful labyrinth, that it was sheer luck – the luck of a lifetime – to have caught this last intransigence of modernism on the wing ...”