“... of the story, ‘North’, ends with a ritual burning before the family go south. This summary may make the book sound fey, which it is not. It depicts with precision the vigorous life of the everyday world: its relationships, its landscapes. The narrator’s vision is convincingly a child’s, but it also resembles that of William Golding’s primitive ...”

“... up to the Macclesfield Mamba for five minutes. Tom steps into the ring, his jaw set. Young he may be, but he is also lithe and fit, his limbs straight and his heart British ... By clever footwork he evades the lethal clutch of the Mamba for the first four and a half minutes, but at last he is caught when the Mamba pretends to stumble and Tom offers him ...”

“... The telling of fantastic tales is, as I’ve remarked, a characteristic of the Joy men, and may remind us that Mr Carey also likes to do so. The Fat Man in History is now known, in its paperback version, as Exotic Pleasures, the title of one of the other stories. The fantasy in these tales is bolder and more successful than in the novel. One of them is ...”

“... but feel that quantum mechanics would soon have surfaced had any one of these men not lived. This may even be true of most of Einstein’s work, with the notable exception of the General Theory, which gave the explanation of gravity and showed that Newton’s achievement was not quite complete. So Professor Tolstoy is right, I think, in placing Maxwell next ...”

“... Banse, who sought to penetrate ‘the soul of the country’. His reading of the English scene may add grist to the mill of Martin Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, but that will certainly not detract from its appeal. While Richard Muir, an academic geographer turned freelance author, is writing for a popular ...”

“... the command seems to be: ‘Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.’ Reviewers may invoke context, but they seem happier applying cold steel to exemplary detail: recounting plots, probing quotations, isolating terms, unravelling faulty metaphors. Close-quarter carnage sets the seal on a reviewer’s integrity, but it also narrows in that ...”

“... domestic happiness, another story altogether. How it will eventually be reconciled with this one may be a problem calling, in future years, for more ...”

“... list the organisations with which I was associated that the FBI considered Communist fronts. Some may have been, but the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, the Congress of American Women, the Sleepy Lagoon Committee, the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions, and the Civil Rights Congress were widely based liberal-left organisations. There is ...”

“... receive a copy of the picture as soon as it was taken.) In the first of many such moments – this may in fact be the film’s undeclared main theme – the quiet scene of photographer and client is invaded by a mob. The theme being: you think you’re alone or in a couple, but you’re not. Or: no one is ever alone. In this case a tickertape parade provides ...”

“... a film begins in a basement and ends in the mountains, we know that a spatial metaphor or two may be in the offing – as in Bong Joon-ho’s earlier work The Snowpiercer (2013), where social classes are marked by their location (front and back) on a long train, and defined by a grim and nasty talk (given by Tilda Swinton with a Yorkshire accent) about ...”

“... from Buchenwald razed a public garden to create an open space suited to party rallies. On May Day 1937, Rudolf Hess laid the foundation stone of the Hall of the People’s Community, with standing room for two thousand. It is now a shopping centre. The huge administrative building for the local party remains, occupied by the Thuringian state ...”

“... quarrels and the musical had their day too (in Kramer vs. Kramer and All That Jazz), and we may feel that Roman Polanski’s Tess belongs to both old and new worlds, but still: it was a good year for otherness. This feeling is strongly supported by Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, a careful reworking of and elaborate homage to F.W. Murnau’s ...”

“... these, but he will need broad political support. Past talks with the ELN all ended in failure. He may also face tensions with the armed forces (though military pride in belonging to the ‘oldest democracy in Latin America’ helps). Meanwhile, the right and the private sector, particularly larger companies, will oppose structural reforms and any loss of ...”

“... point to this difficult period in the second room of the exhibition, which contains a poster from May 1942 with ‘instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry’ to report to a Civil Control Station, and a vitrine featuring Asawa’s Relocation Authority identification card, with a photograph of her aged seventeen. The camp was also the site of an ...”

“... come in the wake of break-ups. The lover – the bird or bard – has flown. The reader may very well think this is no bad thing. Williams’s leavers are all-rounders, shining, uncomplicated, confident, bossy creatures, ‘free to play or free to slack’, as Robert Lowell put it, the ‘or’ multiplying their already monstrous freedom. They are ...”