“... become Dirty Harry and got the writing credit on Pocket Money (1972), in which Lee Marvin and Paul Newman are involved with a small herd of cattle. One critic said it felt like a home movie in which the two actors were killing time. One way or another, Malick was finding a way to get round Hollywood’s rules.He had hoped to make a film of Walker Percy’s ...”

“... of time for a film Hollywood considered an ‘epic flop’. Its only defender was the star, Paul Newman, who bravely called it ‘the most significant film I’ve ever made and the best’. He and Stone came out of it as friends, but reviews and box office were dismal. Stone was the screenwriter of record and in his memoir of the 1960s, Prime Green, he took ...”

“... praises for it. The more minimal the gesture, the more rapturous the explanation offered. Barnett Newman painted a vertical stripe on a canvas, and Thomas Hess saw it as a version of divine creation – ‘as God separated light from darkness, with a line drawn in the void’. (The metaphor does not even correspond to the ...”

“... and, in general relativity, the Penrose diagram of space-time, the Penrose inequality and the Newman-Penrose formalism.Cosmology is about everything. It subsumes all other disciplines – but only in principle. In practice, cosmology has little to contribute to our understanding of how birds lay eggs or how the human immune system recognises a ...”

“... vellum book of MSS on the sofa’. Sometimes he would walk over to the Carlyles and smoke, but Thomas, whose own public career was taking off, doubted how far Tennyson would rise: ‘He is often unwell; very chaotic – his way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon.’Richard Holmes suspects that ...”

“... ecclesiastical tradition. The high point was reached more than three hundred years ago when Sir Thomas Browne published his Religio Medici, and Johnson’s indebtedness to this tradition is seen best in his borrowing of two habits common to such books: the sarcastic ridiculing of all secular opposition and a pious refusal to believe that atheism really ...”

“... regimen, I should very soon be in a deplorable state of what is called nervous disease.’ Thomas Carlyle, whose own nerves had their deplorable moments, knew a fraught hidden drama when he saw one: ‘How has this man contrived, with such a nervous system, to keep alive for near sixty years?’ Given this insight, it was mischievous of Carlyle to go ...”

“... denunciations. He happily lays into Augustine and Calvin (and folds the cheerless Cardinal Newman into the mix). As he rightly complains, the very idea of depravity ‘depends on our being able to think of some actions and motives as being better than others’. We know that there are small sins and large sins, but if we acknowledge this for practical ...”

“... rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating each’. He also knew John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, who – Taylor said, again memorably – was ‘nervous and still, deeply learned, a silent reservoir with a gleam’. Taylor’s daughter Una later wrote Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside ...”

“... Antisocial behaviour resulted from antisocial architecture. The American architect Oscar Newman argued that successful architecture offered its users ‘defensible space’, while the British geographer Alice Coleman surveyed 4099 blocks of flats and decided the problems of social housing had less to do with underfunding, unemployment or poverty than ...”