“... when it gets boring.’ But most of the film’s dialogue isn’t his; nor did he invent what may be its finest new technology, the so-called fame machine (machine à gloire), where the seats of a theatre are made to produce a persistent clapping sound as though filled by an enthusiastic audience. The film’s key themes are manipulation and ...”

“... complacent cruelty are bad enough, but the pride and pleasure the owner takes in his method may be even worse. Perhaps he has seen The Great Dictator after ...”

“... I was always late to the party,’ Lin (who is Asian American) writes about Axis, ‘but in fact I may not have been invited.’But then we should never assume that the gay bar is a safe space by nature. In his chapter on The Apprentice in London’s East End, Lin discusses the gay skinheads and white nationalists who used to frequent the local pubs: violence ...”

“... approach for any historian – or for anybody – which believes that, though the Emperor may indeed be wearing some clothes, it is essential to examine them all meticulously in the likelihood that they will turn out to be very much shoddier than he would like them to seem. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War I went to stay with Alan and ...”

“... this at very different ages, from about thirty-five to the limit of the mortal span. A grandmother may start out as tougher and handier than the young mother herself. Her role is likely to change distressingly. ‘I didn’t like it when she got really old,’ says one of the book’s contributors, ‘because she used to dribble when she was eating her dinner ...”

“... and in London, describes Boxer in his autobiography as ‘both Figaro and the Count’, which may suggest not a blend of patrician wilfulness and backstairs cunning but internal strife between the two. Presumably you had to know him well to get an inkling of that. More obviously he was handsome, dandyish, an upper-class socialist. He liked cricket, bridge ...”

“... persona is a true reflection of his general character. There is a try-anything-once, devil-may-care extraversion about the big bruin that makes him want to learn to fly, drive too fast, stand up to his neck all day in freezing Scottish streams in the hope of a salmon and then sample every whisky known to man in the evening. Heaven help those who try to ...”

“... An enormous amount of reading has been done, a vast number of persons interviewed. The reader may sometimes find himself wishing for a little less detail, but the writing is lucid, and a clear picture emerges both of the man and of the problems that he faced at different times in his short but highly charged career. On nearly all the issues Mr Williams ...”

“... calling it ‘an academic romance’, and an epigraph from Hawthorne adds that authors of romances may ‘claim a certain latitude, both as to ... fashion and material’, which would not be permitted to anyone professing to write a novel. And, with a touch of the professor, Lodge also directs our attention to Patricia Parker’s admirable book Inescapable ...”

“... necessarily operated independently of substantial industrial change. Limited industrialisation may have caused a uniquely wide dissemination of consumer goods and attitudes in England, but again one needs to be careful. Too much of the evidence for lower-class consumerism cited by McKendrick is literary and too much is drawn from London. In many Northern ...”

“... got there by looking at pictures. The images that work as images – vile and violent though they may be – are those that acknowledge their jokes, and their precedents. Take Winter Timber, 2009, assembled from 15 canvases (below). There’s decoration in the bracken – a nod to William Morris. The stump, beneath its eyes, has a jagged jaw. There’s a ...”

“... to flummox that frequently harried personage, the ‘spectator’. Visitors to a Sehgal show may expect to be buttonholed, charmed, cajoled or ignored by the dozens of ‘interpreters’ – not quite actors, nor fully collaborators – whom he employs to perform or embody his work. In This progress, at the Guggenheim in 2010, museum-goers were greeted ...”

“... not have known for some time that oil is central to modern capitalist civilisation. His statement may just be intended, though, to provide a tidier point of origin for his oil project than the subject itself – ubiquitous, indissociable from our lives – can offer. Of course, oil’s omnipresence is one of the things that makes it hard to depict, and ...”

“... that a single Higgs particle should be a bit smaller than an atom of gold. Incredible as it may sound, powerful microscopes can actually image individual atoms of gold. But unlike gold atoms, Higgs particles should be remarkably evanescent, with a lifetime of roughly a trillion-trillionth of a second: they simply won’t sit still long enough to be ...”

“... assassination (‘A Nation Mourns’, 17 September 1966) is a star cover. Younger readers may prefer a ghoulish photo of Norman Tebbit, the Tories’ ‘New Caring Face’ in 1986, and his prince-of-darkness bubble: ‘I can’t speak to you now. The sun’s coming up.’ But if a long-lost favourite is not on view at the exhibition, it can be found ...”