“... very well done by Anthony Veiller for the Siodmak movie, with uncredited help from John Huston and Richard Brooks. The Siegel film, written by Gene Coon, borrows the plot from the first but transposes scenes and careers: New Jersey, Philadelphia and boxing become Miami, California and car-racing. The stars change too: Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner become John ...”

“... rights (say, up to 5 per cent enrichment), together with security guarantees and technical help. Richard Haass, who was director of policy planning at the State Department until 2003, believes that ‘Iran should be offered an array of economic, political and security incentives’, including ‘a highly limited uranium-enrichment pilot programme so long as ...”

“... of shorthand for much the film isn’t saying, perhaps can’t say. Roma was eloquently berated by Richard Brody in the New Yorker for not telling us enough about its time and place, and above all for not giving its heroine a voice, just submitting her to series of unexplained actions. Brody is right if we think Cuarón is trying to be De Sica or Rossellini ...”

“... after the night of 14-15 April 1912 about the ‘good press’ the story was receiving. The white spaces and big lettering of newspapers had, he thought, ‘an incongruously festive air’, with ‘a disagreeable effect of feverish exploitation of a sensational Godsend’. Even before the ship sank it seemed as if the century of progress was pregnant ...”

“... is this ensemble, stretching across a millennium and round thousands of miles of coastline, that Richard Fletcher has taken as his subject in The Conversion of Europe. What concerns him is not the conversion of this or that people but all medieval conversions (including conversions between Christianity and its two rival monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, which ...”

“... about as a child, it has nothing much to do with having lived for 50 years or more. It is, as Richard Shweder and the other anthropologists insist in the coyly named collection of ethnographical essays Welcome to Middle Age!, a ‘cultural fiction’.* Faced with the label, I find it hard not to wonder what use such a designation could be. Presumably ...”

“... story (which promptly ditches the promising Mrs Fleamarsh with her urn ‘the size and shape of a white crock of Gentleman’s Relish’) gets even funnier. As an expert in the ways of exotic foreigners, the narrator is asked to solve the mystery of a Muslim who has some unpleasant bits and pieces in his Mortlake lodgings. He turns out to be a fanatic who has ...”

“... reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without exception bizarre, baffling or psychotic. In ...”

“... played by Malcolm McDowell, passing the vodka to his friends, Johnny and Wallace (David Wood and Richard Warwick), asks: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to know.’ Elsewhere in the film, when the three of them are fencing together, playing at fighting, Travis gets cut on the hand, and is fascinated by his own blood. ‘Look,’ he says: ‘real ...”

“... toasted ‘trial by British jury’. Whether Pitt’s Government sought to initiate a reign of ‘white terror’, as E.P. Thompson suggested, remains a matter of speculation. In his third section, ‘Alarms and Diversions’, Barrell produces two fine chapters on the ‘popgun’ plot and the strange case of ...”

“... past their limits as artists or actors or technicians, and made them propel their material, Richard Condon’s cheaply paranoid fantasy, past its limits.’ And part of the answer is to do with the power of that fantasy, the way in which The Manchurian Candidate links into the enduring pattern of paranoid politics in America. Despite its talk of ...”

“... 1908 and 1917, Verse Revolutionaries is decidedly about the pursuit of what Pound called ‘the white stag, Fame’. He had a knack for it. As a friendless arriviste in London in 1908, he self-published a pamphlet at Christmas cannily called A Quinzaine for This Yule and then used the fact that it had sold out to convince Elkin Mathews to republish it under ...”

“... and guidelines that determine what research is approved. Thanks to the clinical ethics movement, white-coated bioethicists work in hospitals and medical schools – advising doctors and nurses, writing notes on patients’ charts. Bioethicists serve as consultants to managed care organisations, advisers to non-profit medical foundations, and expert witnesses ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated ...”