“... between The Big Sleep as realised by Howard Hawks in 1946, from a script by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, and the sad remake, written and misdirected by Michael Winner in 1978. Humphrey Bogart’s momentum, his Jacobean wit, is transformed by the passage of time into Robert Mitchum’s monumental disdain. Mitchum is ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... school, the poetic romances of Keats in it would not have seemed so different from those of Leigh Hunt. Already the pages of Alvarez’s The New Poetry have a dated look, arising not so much from the poems themselves as from their juxtaposition, marshalled, loaded and pointed the same way by their frenetic commander. As anthologist he imposed his will ...”

“... over the top. The smirking crew around Redwood are deeply depressing, Tony Marlow and Edward Leigh both fat and complacent and looking like two cheeks of the same arse. It’s all so sixth-form, the prefects in revolt. 14 July. Letter this morning saying the Tokyo production of Wind in the Willows is to be revived for two weeks in August, the revival to ...”

“... included. (Not always successfully: last year, it transpired that Frémaux had rejected Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, a far superior film to most in competition). I’ve heard disgruntled French critics call Frémaux the ‘Kim Jong-un of the Riviera’. He is reported to display despotic tendencies and there is nothing to prevent him from staying in the ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”