“... daughter. More alarming, the characters do not react realistically to dramatic events. Nilofer may no longer be in love with her first husband, Dmitri, but when he is murdered, you would expect her to feel horror or pity – or at least guilt at her own lack of feeling – but she has recovered her poise within a few paragraphs. When a spy is discovered at ...”

“... Be cautious about lust, that story would rather sentimentally go, because even simulated lust may turn you into a human being. No, it’s rather that Wong lives in a world – Ang Lee and his writers want us to think about a world – in which performance is everything, or everything you can know for sure. There is another self beyond the current action ...”

“... was it his hand or Salim’s that lost hold of her as she was running for the train? – and he may have turned this regret into what he regards as the love of his life. He certainly wants to marry her, and surely just not for old times’ sake. She tries to leave the gangster and go away with Jamal but is caught at the railway station and slashed across ...”

“... State Department before he called Putin. Obama charmed him during their first meeting, and now he may keep some bits of Obamacare – forget all those years he spent saying the president was born in Kenya. He demoted the leader of his transition team, Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor mired in his own scandal for allegedly having his aides pursue a ...”

“... for a reduced sentence; those who insist on a trial will be assigned a public defender who may have only a few hours to prepare. The producer and director of Making a Murderer, by contrast, spent years studying one case. They provide no narrative voiceover, but present the words and images they have gathered as evidence for us to ...”

“... morbid, or Gothic. A poet who exclaims ‘I lost all my bets/on the living/and the dead-for-now’ may well share something with earlier singers of the unhomely and uncanny, from Thomas De Quincey to Ian Curtis. His Earth, like theirs, is a purgatory where anything can happen and no one can leave: ‘My brother is hanging from the branches/Hanging or ...”

“... have done something else unlawful during the rioting. The victim later dies, and we think this may be an important part of the film’s plot. It is, but only because it sets up the cop for the main adventure, where he has the leading role. He is called Krauss – some of the names of the historical characters have been changed – and is played by Will ...”

“... is to be located. Abandon the idea of interpreting a dream, and what of interest is left? I may be biased. A reader’s attitude to this whole project will be influenced by her attitude to literary dreams. I’m neutral to sceptical. ‘I don’t read dreams,’ a critic (a good critic) once told me flatly. He meant, dream sequences in novels. Every ...”

“... a piece of the thing itself. Piano is unusual in finding both equally important. A building may be like a ship, as a visual and emotional metaphor, but a building next to the water can also carry over elements directly from the shipyards – like the new Whitney Museum on the Hudson, with its haphazard piles of container-like structures. Piano’s ...”

“... Their duties included dusting the weapons supposedly left behind by Agamemnon’s army.In May 334 bc Trojan tourism got a boost from Xerxes’ ultimate successor. Alexander the Great and his best friend, Hephaestion, anointed the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus respectively and raced around the burial mound in imitation of the funeral rites described ...”

“... to represent a return to responsible national government rather than a deep ideological shift. It may well be the case that in a time of crisis, the public sees governments as being like lightbulbs: when they stop working, they need to be changed, and the most important thing to consider about the new bulb is whether it will give you a shock. The irony is ...”

“... I was young, but which seems strange and hard to understand now. I don’t know why that is. It may be to do with his belief in God. The website also has Turgenev’s letters, which were legion and often in French, though they’ve been translated into Russian here. There is one drawback. The Russian texts have no page numbers and you can’t mark where ...”

“... Sultana, isn’t clear. Sultana is thought to have been killed in an air strike in 2016; Abase may also be dead.) Begum told the Times that she wanted to return to the UK to have her baby, but the government decided to make this im­pos­sible by stripping her of her cit­izenship. Amendments to the 1981 British Nationality Act give the home secretary ...”

“... house in Sansepolcro where Piero’s nephew, Francesco, lived with his wife, Madonna Laudomia. It may have been a gift to mark their marriage, an important match securing an alliance with a family from the nearby town of Montevarchi. Most historians now agree that The Nativity was a private project rather than a commission, a consensus that challenges the ...”

“... cool tones and deep blacks, are the work of a mature artist. The Barbican retrospective (until 11 May) opens with a group of works made in 2007-8, a few years after Davis arrived in Los Angeles from New York, where he had cut short his studies at the Cooper Union, frustrated by the emphasis on conceptual training over painting as process. ‘I left school ...”