“... volunteering as a duty, a way of helping the 1.8 million French soldiers who had been captured in May and June 1940; workers who didn’t sign up were cowards. It was also hoped that the better wages, food and employment opportunities in Germany would encourage workers to volunteer. The arrival of the first contingent of returning prisoners in Compiègne was ...”

“... Whatever else it may be, Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (now available on DVD from Artificial Eye) does not resemble the afternoon bill at the old Plaza or the new Cineplex. He first thought of creating a history of cinema in 1978. It would be told, he said, ‘archaeologically and biologically’. In spite of the metaphors, the plan seemed conventional enough: an account of movements and techniques, of changes of ‘cultural terrain ...”

“... fables. One says that genius needs humiliation to get it going: so much so that the humiliation may be more important than the genius, a nicely faux-democratic message. The other says you can only make real money, money beyond dreams as distinct from just a lot of ordinary money, if you don’t care about wealth at all. Genius doesn’t calculate, even when ...”

“... Some drawings, made as ends in themselves, can be called ‘presentation drawings’, others may have been made as part of a painter’s education. Some seem to have no purpose other than to please the maker. In Leonardo’s red chalk profiles of an old and a young man, young beauty and crumpled age are so well represented in the young man’s ringlets ...”

“... and fiction which appeared after about 1928 (Remarque, Sassoon, Edmund Blunden among many others) may have sobered the memorial designers. God also retreats several paces from the iconography, although the graves of the unidentified dead are still marked ‘Known to God’ and the families still write: ‘May God protect ...”

“... to define. Perhaps we’re sluggish if we’re failing to make progress. If we’re slow, there may not be any progress to make. In a slow movie, we can pay attention to the scenery, the outfits, the accents and think about what’s in the corner of the frame. We can remember there used to be something called a Princess phone, even if the name doesn’t ...”

“... straight. When Brigitte Bardot, as the sulky beautiful wife of Michel Piccoli, the writer who may or may not work on the film within the film, tells her husband she despises him, cueing us in to our title, we realise she has found the word she has been looking for during the last 45 minutes of film. A good word, and ...”

“... Marseillais. Maison Empereur is a hardware shop unlike any hardware shop I have been to: it may be very much more recent than the arrival of the Greeks – but there aren’t many shops in Europe that are 191 years old. Beretta, the Lombardy gunmaker, was founded in the 16th century – it made cannons for the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in ...”

“... to a supplicant visit to a jungle snake cult, and the suggestion that, once fully recovered, he may expect to be indentured to the cultists by his grateful father. During this anxious interval, the boy comes across a book in ‘one of Lomé’s modest bookstores, run by missionaries’, which he buys and reads that morning on the beach. The book is a work ...”

“... of the Communist states. What are they? The right to work does not exist: full employment may be a goal but whether it is attainable depends on the state of the market. To the Italian journalist who sneered that it was extraordinary that the East should find the West so attractive when the Eighties were the most anti-social decade in recent ...”

“... affinities of stories, as it is itself about. The publisher seems to be a bit afraid that people may think Haroun simply a children’s book. It is certainly that, even in being full of the adult jokes, tricks and ingenuities of the sort children enjoy. But it is true that there are hints and implications, presumably included for the benefit of their ...”

“... it. Its practitioners were largely unaware that ‘there is no limit’ to what the novelist ‘may attempt as an executant – no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes’. A new novel by Julian Barnes is a reminder that – up to a point, anyway – the situation has changed. Without being defiantly weird or consciously trying ...”

“... saw it, the first fruits of their labour, nevertheless did subsist for a very long time: but they may not survive much longer. Agribusiness doesn’t need peasants, and capitalism needs a consumer culture, to which peasants cannot belong and remain peasants. Nineteenth-century economic pressures forcibly converted peasantries into urban ...”

“... with the top frogs in the entertainment industry. But there’s no way of checking on that.) They may both be green and imaginary, but apart from that the two frogs are very different. The frog-as-prince is the embodiment of a profoundly anti-frog message: to be a frog is to be punished, to be sentenced to a season in purgatory. As with most fairy ...”

“... British Gaullism lacked its Malraux, because I am no longer so sure. I am more worried now that it may have too many, a multitude of complex, sophisticated people, all ravaged by the fate of idealism in these cold springs that we are getting, while the rest of us accuse ourselves of not having proved sophisticated or complex enough for the perplexities of our ...”