“... he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries. When David Sylvester once asked what precisely was so deplorable about it (a ‘kind of caution’ perhaps?), Bacon’s response was studiedly offhand. ‘Well,’ he drawled, clearing his throat. ‘Well . . . Illustration surely ...”

“... Kardashian (you knew it was only a matter of time before the Kardashians came into it), played by David Schwimmer in the TV series, was perfectly certain in life of his friend’s innocence, yet, in TV-land, certainty is just a crease to be ironed out by the ‘journey’. In the first episode, we see Kardashian talking to his shy young children at the ...”

“... East Coast, where euphemisms are easily understood, and a phrase like ‘painting houses’ means contract killing, as it does in Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Though the obvious does occasionally have to be explained. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part II, ‘if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ It’s ...”

“... publicity material. Sheng shi hua zhang is a sonorous and vaguely archaic-sounding phrase which means something like ‘Splendours of an Age of Prosperity’, apt for the Qing era when the Chinese emperors ruled the largest and most populous empire on the globe. It is also a term with contemporary resonances, widely used to describe such phenomena as a new ...”

“... psychotherapy one is not trying to establish objective truth’ but rather to find ‘a means of containing experience, in the sense of giving it form and meaning’. This will usually involve going over and over the most difficult of life’s events rather than avoiding them, since ‘more often than not the truth is what works.’ ‘I can’t ...”

“... of the man!’ Walter Benjamin thought a philosophy that couldn’t account for fortune-telling by means of coffee grounds couldn’t be a real philosophy. Many have thought just the reverse, of course. One mention of coffee grounds and the like, and we are no longer talking about philosophy. But then these are just the people Benjamin was out to provoke, and ...”

“... 1938 congressional midterms was barely 35,000. This remarkably limited franchise was achieved by means of elaborate rules – including a poll tax – designed to make voting both difficult and expensive; it was backed up by threats of violence to anyone who challenged the status quo. The aim, of course, was to make sure the electorate remained exclusively ...”

“... always been a maker of projects rather than films: that is, of projects whose primary but by no means only expression is a film. Fitzcarraldo, the most demanding of them all, is a film about a project. Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald López (1862-97), the opera-loving rubber baron, once got a boat across an isthmus by having it taken apart on one side and ...”

“... have noticed anything at all. The grasping mediocrity of this administration’s members is by no means its worst fault but it is the most beneficial to the nation if it is what eventually leads to its timely collapse. The resignations are the best-publicised outgrowth of governmental decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre ...”

“... as to the value of revered works of literature need every so often to be dispelled, even if it means that some people swear off the canon altogether. For most others, the results aren’t likely to be so decisive or long-lasting. Like the warnings issued about cigarettes, the cautions about eggs, alcohol and chocolate, or the recent scare in the US about ...”

“... David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables in this country: those accused of committing a crime. It will strip away safeguards that have taken centuries to accrue, and alienate criminal suspects further from society as a whole ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... of surtitles would suggest.) It disdains understatement or ambiguity. Profligate with its means, opera characteristically fails to support its compulsive gesturing with adequate syntax: a two-minute Lied by Wolf concentrates more musical argument into its dramatic adventure than an hour of Cavalleria Rusticana. The grand original principle of dramma ...”