“... of manslaughter is next on the programme.’ These elaborate designs and the reference to them may seem gratuitous, but of course that appearance is precisely the point, the vivid, continuing collaboration of randomness and intricate order. As Hitchcock told Truffaut with a fine sense of double thinking: ‘Even a gratuitous scene must have some ...”

“... agenda? Do you still do candles for your birthday?’ Some of the questions, then, may be straightforwardly answered, but many don’t really allow for articulated response: they urge reflection, invite imaginative excursions or set up covert statements, permitting simply agreement or dissent. This is not (for the most part) what could be ...”

“... in 1986 he set out his position: ‘He is very difficult to stage (light – position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs him but I can do without him. I have never seen him function effectively.’ Necessary but dispensable, the sort of paradox that can be richly productive in literature, but translates into the world of ...”

“... that The Shock of the Fall is ‘so good it will make you feel a better person’, though that may be the last thing anyone should ask of a novel. The narrator, Matthew Homes, is 19 years old. He lives in Bristol. When he was nine, his older brother, Simon, who had Down’s syndrome, died during a family holiday at a caravan park on the Dorset coast. The ...”

“... misses his ‘scattershot stupidity’, and falls slightly back in love with Stephen. They may not have a baby to care for, but they have the titular Wallcreeper, the bird that caused the opening car accident. They pin bits of food to a pegboard on the wall so that the bird can eat while perching in the manner to which it is accustomed. Stephen names ...”

“... Poetry Book Society commendation for her first book, which reveal the baffled admiration, which may or may not be the same as praise, that her poetry provoked in a climate we think of as polarised between the sensible formalism of the Movement and Alvarez’s New Poetry, with its call to go beyond ‘the gentility ...”

“... was the vicar of Ludgvan in Penwith. At 52 he felt ‘his energies starting to dim’ but then, in May 1748, he ‘happened to bump into two distinguished antiquarians’ – also parsons, needless to say – and what he told them about local antiquities so amazed them that he was encouraged to set off on a renewed career of walking, collecting, describing and ...”

“... and shootings temper the excitement of electoral empowerment. Whatever the election observers may say, it’s Suu Kyi herself who will – in the eyes of the West at least – decide whether or not the election has been ‘inclusive, transparent and credible’. She is the West’s true election monitor. The United States, the EU and especially the ...”

“... items in Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, an exhibition at the National Gallery (until 22 May) in which paintings by Eugène Delacroix mingle with others by artists he influenced. In factual terms, Delacroix presents us with a September evening in a country garden, in which the last light lingers on a basket piled deep with produce and on the roses ...”

“... Its new headquarters, designed by Renzo Piano in elegant steel and glass, opened in Chelsea last May. For many months a cultural beacon in uptown Manhattan was dimmed, and the architectural dialogue between the inverted grey ziggurat of the Whitney on Madison Avenue and the expansive white spiral of the Guggenheim on Central Park, another masterpiece of late ...”

“... for a centrist candidate as well as one from the left: in the first round of elections on 27 May, Sergio Fajardo, a former academic, got 23.7 per cent of the vote, only just behind the 25 per cent which put Petro into the final round. Fajardo, like Petro, was an independent candidate representing a coalition movement. What will happen to the peace ...”

“... oblige her in memory of all her great goodness to us – when it did make such a difference – of May 1910.’ He was referring to the death of his brother William. He then told Alice that Mrs Swynnerton was ‘doing – finishing – the portrait of me that she pushed on so last year’. Doing, finishing, pushed – James isn’t pleased with the ...”

“... Justine’s foolish, ill-at-ease paramour; and Brett, L’s young and beautiful companion who may, or may not, be his lover. This cast has gathered on an unidentified island where they are awaiting some non-specific global catastrophe from whose effects money and circumstance have rendered them exempt. The book must ...”

“... Turks appear idle, reclining on ancient monuments seemingly unaware of their significance.’ That may be so – Chandler describes meetings with locals who think the ruins are an old castle – but it’s hard to divine Mustapha and the interpreter’s impressions of the surroundings from the painting alone, and they look watchful rather than relaxed.In ...”

“... I am the one who gets up first in the morning and feeds her before opening the kitchen door she may think I am her primary caretaker, if that is the phrase, and therefore her owner. And it is my bed that the cat comes to at night, after hunting, and she curls up under the sheets between my knees. It is strange to have her there, but I believe she used to ...”