“... involving falling and doors and eating and drinking and shrinking and growing, and for a while we may think this is a film of Alice in Wonderland after all. But only until she gets through one of the doors. Once through the door we are in Burtonland, all giant plants and tendrils, sometimes proliferating, sometimes scorched and skeletal, a jungle that ...”

“... and other traditions on his art was great, and ignorance of its meaning in a tribal context may have enhanced the freedom it brought. Yet it is the sense one has when faced with ancient or exotic things that there is something beyond what can be grasped by mere inspection, if only some priest or shaman could give the correct interpretations, that makes ...”

“... There is nothing quite as directly world-historical as this in The Shop around the Corner, but we may wonder how many directors could make a failed suicide part of a romantic comedy and still be famous for a light touch. For all its lightness and charm, the film really is about the entrapments and aspirations of what Siegfried Kracauer called the ...”

“... in nationalist-held territory, last November’. In the same letter: ‘I would mention, if I may, that since 1967 I have made four visits to nationalist-controlled areas in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique … and have walked a total of some 600 miles there.’ In Davidson’s career, ground covered on foot signifies the slow assertion of the will, as real ...”

“... an entirely different movie. The resemblances, as they say, are entirely coincidental, although we may believe that in the collective imagination as in Freud’s unconscious there are no accidents, only genres. This second film is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on the first novel in the late Stieg Larsson’s bestselling trilogy (the others are The ...”

“... We can’t reconcile them, and we would be in bad shape if we could. There is one effect that may link these pieces, even if the joke is on us. We keep forgetting, as the characters do, that the world of The Hunger Games is one where nothing goes unfilmed. When Katniss visits a hospital in District 8, a place that has been savagely bombed by Capitol ...”

“... evidence that the airline was specifically targeted by the Lockerbie bombers – whoever they may have been, but that’s another story* – for its iconic status. By the time it shut down, the airline was losing two million dollars a day. Since filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 1991 it had been frantically ditching assets like unwanted ballast ...”

“... He says he has spent the last 15 years in Algiers, running a restaurant, and he implies that he may have done a little more than that. ‘I had a certain influence,’ he says. There is something about the contented, theatrical way in which he says that these were the best years of his life that makes us wonder what he is hiding, and his brother-in-law ...”

“... by the Suns heat in those countries, so Eels are bred of a particular dew falling in the months of May or June on the banks of some particular Ponds or Rivers, apted by nature for that end; which in a few dayes are by the Suns heat, turned into Eels, and some of the Ancients have called the Eels that are thus bred, The Off-Spring of Jove.’ Before he became a ...”

“... by the media. This demand for self-promotion diminishes the actual work of art, whatever that art may be, and it has become universal. The media simply can’t discuss a work of literature without pointing to some writer-hero.’ The new ‘revelation’ confirms that – though even Ferrante couldn’t have conceived that the thing she wanted to keep to ...”

“... at askance as part of ‘a wider bias against applicants from less privileged backgrounds who may be lacking the “polish” of their upper-middle-class, Russell Group-educated contemporaries’. The justification for this, as old as snobbery itself, is that the brown-shoe wearer would simply not ‘fit in’. Snobbery works like Chinese boxes. The ...”

“... the illusion of killing? The fun is unmistakable, in the tale and in the movie as we watch it. It may be that De Palma’s offhand and cheerful tone tells one story and hides another. The tone is the same whatever he is talking about: his philandering father, what went wrong or right with this or that film, which actor or writer was totally unbearable, his ...”

“... three kings and a queen on a few square metres between sky and sea.’ I think the intention may be to say there is no stopping a real Caesar or a real destiny, but the effect is to suggest that destiny itself, to borrow the film’s logic, needs a lot of luck. There are many moments when it seems as if Napoléon could easily have been called The Triumph ...”

“... the bravura flecks and dashes, transforming into frills and buttons, of Venetian painting. It may be also that these really were domestic servants: it was surely easier to engage them for sittings while living on the estate of his patrons, the Castaings, just north of Chartres, where at the same time he was painting a peasant woman as Rembrandt’s ...”

“... been reconfigured as a dispersed set of objects in the gallery, including props and images, which may function without the artist’s presence, and so provoke the question of where and how each of these categories – video, performance and installation – abuts or bleeds into the others. In 1976 Jonas had an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art ...”