“... directly and by anagram to the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, who recently sued Brown’s publisher for plagiarism and lost. The third author, Henry Lincoln, didn’t sue. The book itself is mentioned in large capitals, and Teabing comments on it pedantically (‘their fundamental premise is sound’). Of ...”

“... as social body, as spectacle. It would be hard to credit the resulting confusion in the Reagan White House between the personal and the political, the historical and the imaginary, were not the evidence offered by the President and his circle so compelling. Guts and Glory portrays Oliver North, who enacted the anti-Communist part of Reagan. For the ...”

“... on the disco deck; punk and soul styles are jumbled on the dance floor. Men and women, black and white, gays and straights, mix easily if loudly, having a good time. Two men are seen kissing, but only a newcomer, and our camera, linger over the event. The general effect is raucous and chaotic, but not strident or violent. The punks don’t really dance, they ...”

“... not from L but from Newsweek. So L’s mom will not be with us this day as I am wed in the little white Episcopalian church to the President’s daughter. Nor will her Bostonian kin, who took against him when he went South and registered Republican, not knowing this was the only decent thing to do in a county where the Democrats stood to Goldwater’s ...”

“... wild. His simple and non-natural colours were bright and dynamic reds and blues and yellows, with white for action or potential, and his line the recurring curvilinear crook of a muzzle, a loin, a twisting neck, a kicking hind leg, a pair of ears. The forms are concave, as though knocked out of soft wood with a chisel. In a way, his animals are always the ...”

“... did not appear. Rogers had been featured on the cover of Time; he had been received at the White House by five Presidents. However, unlike his famous male contemporaries – Charles Lindbergh, Al Jolson, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin – Will Rogers has left no aura. In my tiny recent poll of English intellectuals, no one ...”

“... embarrassing him. She will wear a red dress to a ball where all young ladies are supposed to wear white. Dillard, stubborn in his way, takes her to the ball, forces her stay longer than she wants to and to dance emphatically round the floor with him, making them the only persons still moving in a shocked staring crowd. Then he takes her home and calls off the ...”

“... various medical and literacy programmes, and created the Rainbow Coalition with some unlikely white and Puerto Rican allies, along with some rival black groups. Once he becomes too much for the FBI, Hampton is arrested on a trivial charge; while he is in jail, the police attack the Panthers’ headquarters: ‘Cops Torch Terrorist Haven’, is the way the ...”

“... steps above; there are amazing blue night-time exteriors that contrast strongly with the black-and-white indoors. But we are also seeing a clunky old silent thriller, with terrible acting and gestures of sinister foreshadowing that make The Cabinet of Dr Caligari look like a model of cinematic understatement. This might be a matter of then and now, or what we ...”

“... like trying to make this film.’ Getting to work on the film, wresting it from the hands of the white director Norman Jewison, persuading Warner Brothers that it needed to be as long as it is, that the scenes of Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Egypt and Mecca had to be shot on location, all this is a version of Malcolm’s struggle on behalf of the blacks; maybe ...”

“... Gallimard for some time, and email Anne-Solange. She replies, but not as I had hoped.   Dear Michael,   I was about to write to you to say that Ravi Mirchandani just recently acquired UK rights to both Désert and Le Chercheur d’or. I had sent him your translation of the latter, as you know, and he thought it was very good but he finally decided to ...”

“... to ask forgiveness. The movie ends with a dream-memory in which Isak finds his parents, dressed in white, sitting by a lake. He can’t go to them – because they are dead, because he is now older than they were, because this is all in his mind – but the film ends with a shot of his faintly smiling face. ‘My cries did not reach their destination,’ he ...”

“... comes too close to a terrace where hotel guests are eating; everyone is afraid. The screen goes white from the snow or spray, we see only shadowy human shapes, then no one. But fear assumes different forms. Ebba, the mother in the family (Lisa Loven Kongsli), reaches out to protect her children. Tomas, the husband (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), grabs his phone and ...”

“... have the vote. And on another, later day – the film makes this point very broadly – black and white women will have the vote. One of them, a black man, for example, although perhaps not quite yet a white woman, could even become president. Whatever change Obama’s re-election brings to history, I would say its symbolic ...”

“... 20th-century European competitors. North Carolina required not only separate schools for black and white children but segregation of textbooks (‘Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and coloured schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them’). It is an ambitious project, an attempt ...”