“... is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson (Timothy West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish ...”

“... portion, is fraught with inarticulateness and often committed to it as well. Jane Tompkins, in West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, traces some of this to a frank distrust of language and an association of speaking with opening up, compromising and otherwise surrendering. John Wayne, she points out, spoke in monosyllables, often to denounce ...”

“... is summoned from a dreary life in London to go back after ten years’ absence to the house on the west coast where she has spent much of her childhood. It is the residence of Hugo Pierce, the celebrated novelist. But Hugo has just been found dead in the neighbouring woods, and Minnie is needed to stand by and help Moura his widow. There are two sons, Gareth ...”

“... a six-year-old mathematical genius who is the central attractor, but not the protagonist, of Rebecca Goldstein’s new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Twenty-eight is the next perfect number (divisors 14, 7, 4, 2, 1), and 28 arguments for the existence of God might have been more than enough. But 36 is a perfect number of perfect numbers: a ...”

“... railroad, fleecing the government and monopolising long-distance transportation in the west. With this wealth, Leland Stanford founded Stanford University in 1885 on the site of his horse ranch 35 miles south of the city, and it was from Stanford’s loins that Silicon Valley sprang.In 1959, the Buddhist priest Shunryu Suzuki was dispatched to San ...”

“... characteristic have obvious affinities with sacred and profane, the icy Rowena and the sensuous Rebecca. Leafing through Clark’s plates, it seems to be Rebecca who gets the upper hand as we approach the modern era – though with notable exceptions, like the superb movie still of Greta Garbo in The Kiss. The major ...”

“... as Wyndham Lewis did in 1914: ‘What balls!’ So even given the participation of Tom Stoppard, Rebecca Hall and Benedict Cumberbatch, it was surprising to see a Ford adaptation given five hours on BBC2. Ford was last unloosed in this way in 1981, when Julian Mitchell adapted The Good Soldier for Granada Television. That film – starring Jeremy ...”

“... it is. A redefinition of drama, we could say. The time and place are London and the English South-West in the 1950s. Reynolds Woodcock is a fashion designer, furnisher of ghastly, elaborate, stiff dresses to international royalty and other sufficiently rich people. Some of the film’s best scenes just show us the workplace, a London house where a small horde ...”

“... system to express the horrific brutality of slavery’, according to the art historian Rebecca Peabody. If Walker’s silhouettes are an attempt to visualise this inadequacy, what would it mean for an artwork to address it? Should it even try?These questions have troubled artists since abolition. When Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead ...”

“... use only.’ ‘It’s all in here,’ he said as he put it down. It was the Penguin edition of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. For a vast and often unreadable book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was read by a lot of people at the time. Unless you were willing to plough through huge volumes on workers’ self-management, the rise and fall of ...”

“... fear combined with prudence and cunning. It need not be like this, and the latest turn towards the West is an attempt to join the globalised world. Few in Libya believe that Gaddafi was responsible for the Lockerbie disaster, but in order to end sanctions and shift Libya’s political position he admitted guilt and agreed to pay a fortune in compensation. The ...”

“... previously by her childhood names Amonute and Matoaka, and later by her Christian baptismal name, Rebecca, with her husband’s surname: everything about the experience of Native Americans in Europe was caught between the Old World and the New, awkwardly and usually unhappily.The Virginia Company, a private joint-stock venture, had been struggling and needed ...”

“... Matthew’s poems about or connected to Darin, taken from their first two US books (The End of the West, All-American Poem, Flies and Mayakofsky’s Revolver), and printed tête-bêche (upside down with respect to the other). The publisher’s stunt emphasises their common subject and their disparate styles. Michael relies on sparse lines, ecstatic extremes ...”

“... and figuratively, lesbianism remains, even in the great rainbow-flag-waving cities of the West. Some of the smartest and most well-meaning straight people still don’t get it – in fact, don’t even see it. This mole-blindness is all the more bizarre given the unremittingly vulgar sexual explicitness that otherwise assaults us everywhere in the ...”

“... practices of another. In the mosque’s main hall of worship stand the tombs of Abraham, Jacob and Rebecca, sacred to Jews and Muslims. Before 1967 a small rabbinical school, located at the back of the mosque, had been unused for generations: after 1967 the Israelis reopened it, built a library there, and re-excavated some more Old Testament tombs (those of ...”