“... pretensions. One can hear him thinking: why can’t these supposed sophisticates get their story straight? (The translation, by the way, perhaps appositely, is by the late James Kirkup, a British expatriate poet who is best known for his work from the Japanese and who died in Andorra.)Kpomassie stays with people up and down the social scale. He gives ...”

“... Caesar espouses it, and it vanishes when he dies. Antony is too infatuated with Cleopatra to think straight, and doesn’t have those kinds of ambitions anyway. So not only is there no one for the audience to root for, there is nothing to root for, no cause we can care about. But then these problems with the film may represent finds for the ...”

“... slightly to the right towards an alcove, decides it doesn’t need to go there, and continues straight ahead. It turns left into a larger room and moves more confidently towards an old man in a wheelchair, seen from the back. The camera circles round him and pauses in the air close to his face – too close for any plausible human view. Martin Scorsese ...”

“... piece of appetising rubbish? No, a severed human hand. It’s a plastic-looking object, though, straight from the props department. Kurosawa wants just a flicker of film horror, not Gothic realism. But then where is the rest of this hand’s body, and what violence is lurking in this place? The town has been taken over by two gangs, one led by the local ...”

“... beating even Pirates of the Caribbean 2, and prompting Sony Pictures to offer three more sequels straight off, is more of a mess than you can quite believe. Pieces of plot float in from nowhere, supernatural characters develop new sets of powers in mid-scene, all the most soppy and obvious scenes are played as if they were Ibsen and all the jokes have been ...”

“... called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still ...”

“... he channelled Baudelaire and aimed to ‘be the new Rimbaud, and not die at 37 but set the record straight’. He died in 2002, leaving the record anything but straight.Wieners is admired by other writers for his nonconformity, his tenderness and outrageous inventions. Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg ...”

“... says she’ll tell her husband, and he says please do. This is where the plotting gets ludicrous, straight out of French farce, but also irrelevant, because the slow-motion bicycle ride is so funny. Ariane is married to the vain, stupid, lazy Adrien Deume, who works at the League of Nations under Solal. Solal promotes Deume out of lordly contempt and in order ...”

“... so, not many people will now agree with this view. Not all that many, perhaps, will understand it straight off. How could it be fatal? How could you not write or speak as a woman if you were one? Except by pretending to speak or write as a man. But Woolf didn’t want women to write like men. ‘It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived ...”

“... at being a witness of ‘scenes’. The Richard Benjamin of Goodbye Columbus could walk straight into the part. There are no other notable actions. The rest of the novel’s interest lies in the ramifying material. There is the Henry James story, which Nathan reads during the night. He is also very preoccupied about a recent rupture with his ...”

“... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...”

“... this is a complicated matter, there seems to be an almost capricious refusal to get it at least as straight as possible. But the primacy which is thus hazily attributed to the ideological and political certainly makes Professor Laqueur’s book duller than it should be. The one-sex/two-sex argument is, so to speak, the counterpart to the parental demand ...”

“... twenty. But then what is the relation of a historical person to a work that scarcely ever seems straight – that seeks, in White’s words, to ‘strain meaning to the very limits’? Can history live by metaphors alone? One answer is yes – we may want to hang on to biographical interpretations at any price.But there are tracks that respect historical ...”

“... reader would be hard put to say what happened, and yet it’s not because Montale has failed to be straight with him or talked about other things that don’t matter. There is narrative, but of a uniquely interior kind, discontinuous scraps, observations that give rise to reflections. The poem exists on its own, it sticks to its own side of the net, it ...”

“... stank from the start because he knew the way it was supposed to end, even if he couldn’t think straight about it. His job would be over when – to use one of the metaphors for murder that are so rife in this book – he had taken the woman out of the picture.Marías had been here before. These two late novels look back to his trilogy Your Face Tomorrow ...”