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“... movies out like sausages, and it turned out to be a very good idea: the assembly-line concept,’ Frank Capra said. ‘They weren’t our films then. They were called our “product”.’Just as the geriatric jamboree of silent filmmakers starts to lose steam, Jeanine Basinger intrudes herself like an anxious hostess into the conversation and into ...”

“... its long aftermath. In response he passed not just a major cyclical stimulus, but also the Dodd-Frank Act, to regulate finance, and Obamacare, the single most significant domestic policy reform in decades. But Obama was enough of a man of the 1990s to believe that crisis was temporary and normality was just that, the norm. It would return.That assumption ...”

“... with English humanists’ – who therefore speak through Claudius’s rebuke to Hamlet for the frank wastefulness, the sheer childishness, of his grief for his dead father. Indeed, formally most Tudor writers themselves spoke with him, apologising for what they tended to throw away (like Puttenham) as ‘but the studie of my yonger yeares in which vanitie ...”

“... must be broad enough not to be easily bridged or quickly cut through, must be under the close fire of the defence, and near enough to be effectively watched by night. The near edge of the entanglement should be about 20 yards from the trench, and it should be at least 10 yards broad ... It may sometimes be useful to construct a second belt of wire ...”

“... Nazi abbreviation of Konzentrationslager. Wachsmann’s book is a world-making history: from the close observations of individual lives and moments, and of historical forces great and small, his subject emerges. It is no ordinary world. ‘There are times when history is let off the leash,’ the Polish academic Jan Kott remembered one of his teachers saying ...”

“... global warming-related item on the news at least once a week. Today, for instance, there are two: close to home, a judge throwing out the government’s phoney ‘consultation’ process over nuclear power, and further away, at a conference in Washington, an ‘informal agreement’ marking a new commitment to ‘tackling climate change’ and resulting in a ...”

“... than her Life of Powell. Would the difference be due to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are ...”

“... the summer of 1762 he found himself caught in the cross-currents of politics. William Burke, his close friend and possibly a distant relative, was busy canvassing merchant interests in an attempt to whip up opposition to the peace treaty about to be signed with France and Spain. Edmund joined in, declaring that the treaty was ‘the most shameful that ever ...”

“... a year before quarrelling with Malachi over a phrase used just after the death? They have been in close contact for most of the time. And why does he not shave, when Malachi does? Malachi had coaxed him into giving up his Paris beard (Ellmann’s Joyce, p. 136), and this was to have been a gala day for Stephen, standing treat with his earnings. Kenner himself ...”

“... visceral and intimate; its endangerment was realised in the instantaneous transmission of a close-up pistol shot to the gut. It is a perfect piece of raw material for a film that relentlessly explores the human body, and assaults the body of the spectator. Stone’s aim is to make us not so much sec as feel the physical reality of Kennedy’s skull ...”

“... after the annual church picnic had concluded with watermelons. Aunt Annie was cheerful but frank. ‘The man buried here,’ she would say, ‘was a cousin of ours, and he was so mean I don’t know how his family stood him. And this man here,’ she would continue, moving along a few steps, ‘was so good I don’t know how his family stood ...”

“... made deep incursions into the territory of English letters, pruning all rhetorical exuberance with frank impiety. He needed Joyce to be Irish; he needed a mentor to be remote from the centre and thus to be a writer who would, by necessity, break moulds; it could somehow justify Argentina and its terrible distance from where life or letters began. Flann ...”

“... leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to English standards’. Frank Forsdick and his men asked for ‘a bit of old English roast beef or a plate of fish and chips’ and beer instead of wine. It didn’t require the commercial vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such ...”

“... terrorism, North Korea and Iraq. This is a wide-ranging work, in other words, and it repays close study, even by readers who will not find its perspective altogether congenial or convincing. It was America’s reckless foreign policy after 11 September, Mann explains, that compelled him to descend from his ivory tower. ‘For the sake of the ...”

“... with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism; with mid to late Derrida; with Barthes, the decoder of the close-up face in cinema and the figure in the still photograph. She shows us the swaying edifice of Weimar as it goes down, and the horrors that followed. On the face of it, Life? Or Theatre? is the story of a young woman who was meant to kill herself and fought ...”