“... childhood friend – Harper Lee and Capote grew up in the same small town in Alabama – may have come to know, at last, that success breeds its own vices, not least of which is the market’s determination to sell imperfection in place of perfection when the stock is running low. I’ve always had a soft spot for the famous novel. I like its prose ...”

“... and film clips, but probably he is only externalising what was really there. If anything, Davis may have been angrier than Cheadle makes him. He limped from a degenerative hip condition, taking all kinds of painkillers, lots of cocaine, and drinking heavily – ‘Heinekens and cognac’, as he says. But then he has his memories, and in this film we have ...”

“... after the colonial era. Yet Keïta’s work is remarkable for its lack of intrusiveness. Subjects may be on their mettle, in complicated ways, but they aren’t up for examination, or sitting for an ethnographic inventory. The customers led the way. They were paying for a record, in a single, dignified image, of what they imagined themselves or their ...”

“... a new set of conditions as well as possible actions, relationships etc. This event’s name is May 1968. Those who single out today’s student demonstrators as backward-looking – as conservative – always make more or less explicit reference to ’68. In the aftermath of the CPE strikes this was all one read in the US press. Then, the story ...”

“... essay on Englishness, gives no idea of the journal’s cumulative brilliance. Single pictures may undermine each other. Chris Steele-Perkins’s slice-of-life reportage, showing girls fighting on the ground beside a parked car with men looking on, is printed opposite a photograph by Chris Killip of two young men and two cars by the sea – an image as ...”

“... Klíma writes extremely well about women; and if he is not quite as subtle as Brookner, that may be because he is so very keen to put across his message, that what we all need is self-knowledge, humility and forgiveness. The first quality is preached by a wise psychiatrist (they are quite rare in fiction), and the other two by a Catholic priest, Father ...”

“... aspirations and said to himself: ‘Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ The point is rather different, an amplification of the dilemma. We manage to understand each other pretty well, in spite of our differences of idiom and culture – even if most of the authorities in the movie refuse ...”

“... but realised soon enough that wood is unobtainable on the grass steppe (Mongolians may well find wooden sculpture over-expressive). There were several live events. A Swiss artist contributed an enormous kite to carry a ceremonial ‘gift’, a canister of food and drink, to Altan Ovoo. A team of six men hoisted it into the air, and though it ...”

“... unmarked; the government’s only official acknowledgment of it came on the following day, 17 May, when identical editorials in the party mouthpieces the People’s Daily and the Global Times ran under the headline ‘50th Anniversary – Remembrance Should Not Be Extreme’. Fan was a small child during the Cultural Revolution. At the age of nine he ...”

“... he is a member of Scottish CND and a former board member of Friends of the Earth Scotland. He may prove capable of tapping into a growing sense that the SNP is replicating the triangulation and managerialism that alienated so many Scottish voters from New Labour. But the national question remains a sticking point. He must hope that Scotland’s folk ...”

“... the naif a little too much. It’s not just the exclamatory mood, the run-on sentences and devil-may-care enjambment. She interweaves two centos that seem to namecheck half the poetry world (yearbook-style, again), and makes an anaphora poem out of ‘My Acknowledgments’ at the back of the book. The crowd is ever at her back: she wants to be inclusive and ...”

“... jokes, since mayflies have short lives, and, anyway, who would want to test-pilot a machine that may fly? Emphasising the vowel chiasmus in biplane/mayfly, Morrissey herself contrives a linguistic flying machine, and recaptures the acoustics in the last stanza with ‘your footprint missing on earth for the span/of a furlong, as if a giant had lifted its ...”

“... level. ‘There was something in that cake that didn’t agree with him,’ he says of Raft. We may be laughing mainly at the hard work Persoff (or Wilder and his co-writer I.A.L. Diamond) put into this lamentable pun, but surely the actual differences between the uses (rather than the meanings) of ‘agree’ are important here. There is something so mild ...”

“... many directions at once. The long poem has already announced that it’s going to take time, so we may be more than usually willing to stop and solve a series of puzzles on the way. The difficulty comes when the poem does not want to be slowed down. Urgency is at times muted by an overinvestment in observation: the ‘forelocks of a crocus’, the ‘penumbra ...”

“... that’s Blind Willie McTell. And might it now be possible to try your patience further I said may I be permitted, reader, majesty, to tax your patience further and find a form of words for how it felt to see –          after the bailiffs had fucked off          with a truck load of furniture, indoor slides for the ...”