“... and the insidious cult of “breaking the rules”’. In the introduction to his second volume, White Heat, Sandbrook assures his readers that he has tried to avoid ‘the predictable and tiresome ritual’ of either demonising or romanticising the 1960s. This implies that he doesn’t have an argument, which is far from the case. But however partial they ...”

“... Being laid back about being laid was de rigueur.’ Suu, as she was known, wore tight white jeans, made a fool of herself punting, had her heart broken by a dashing Pakistani, and experimented with alcohol, once and once only, in the lavatory of the Bodleian. But ‘by the popular morality of the time Suu was a pure Oriental ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... some of the real issues involved. ‘Without a doubt what had occurred to Liffey had occurred to Richard too – that once a wife is financially dependent, she is sexually dependent too.’ This is an issue that gets so far as to be formulated, but – in a context that includes puffballs and black magic, and another woman who cries into her typewriter, and ...”

“... gets the same wordage as Day-Lewis and a lot less than Maugham. From Australia we have Patrick White but not Christopher Brennan or A.D. Hope. Elsewhere one notes the ample presence of D. Lessing and the absence of D. Jacobson; his near-namesake Roman Jakobson is in, and said to be still alive, though alas he is not. Why Auerbach and not Curtius or ...”

“... At least I assume this is the case, since we hear enough about it. The book is constructed in the Richard Rogers style, with all the functional background stuff displayed ostentatiously on the outside. There is a Thirlwellesque narrator, a writer who lives in East London, drinks a lot of coffee, and has recently ‘got back into the practice of dope’. He ...”

“... is almost bicoloured: in them, the Navy and the Foreign Legion, with their red pompons and white képis respectively, have lengthy interviews with the Marseilles prostitutes, those repositories of human archives. The book closes with an evocation of two young Parisians, more or less childhood friends of the author: these skirt-chasers were the pillars ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”