“... noir I hadn’t seen before, where the ruthless, calculating woman, in the shape of Jane Greer, may also really care for the man she is framing and using, a very young Robert Mitchum. This complexity is not going to do her any good, because both the plot and Mitchum believe in the simpler story of her murderous guile. But ...”

“... any director with two expensive stars on his hands. Remember Michael Mann’s thriller Heat, where Robert de Niro and Al Pacino get together for a totally inconsequential conversation just so we can see them together before they return to their posts on opposite sides of the law. The stars have to share serious screen time, even if the plot stagnates for a ...”

“... by French scholars between 1920 and 1970, at Prehistomania at the Musée de l’Homme (until 20 May).Paris has seen a lot of ‘prehistomania’ in recent years. In 2018, the Musée de l’Homme put on a popular Neanderthal exhibition. The following year, at the Centre Pompidou, Prehistory: A Modern Enigma considered 19th and 20th-century artistic responses ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain ...”

“... and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert Alter, and it has arrived accompanied by a joyful noise, widely acclaimed in the press as the Psalms for Our Time. New translations of a classic text are either done as a criticism of the old translations (correcting mistakes, finding an equivalent that is ...”

“... two new English translations, one by Robin Kirkpatrick, the other by the husband and wife team of Robert and Jean Hollander, should be welcomed. Each edition is the final volume of a long labour, and each helps the reader see this last cantica in the context of the previous two. With Virgil as his guide, Dante has already spiralled down through hell, seen ...”

“... play Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Other actors had been mentioned, including Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum and Sinatra. But Coppola held out; he shot a test in which Marlon made himself up as the old don, and set about finding a creaking, breathless voice for him. Then, in a trice, there was Brando, enthroned for that first scene, with a kitten in his ...”

“... Robert Kolker​ didn’t find the Galvins: they found him. They wanted him – journalist, friend of a friend – to write a book about their family because they ‘believed their story had something that could be of comfort to other people who are suffering’. I can’t quite work out why. If your child starts hearing voices and seeing things that aren’t there, or believes they’re dead, or you’re dead, replaced by an impostor, and nothing can persuade them otherwise, the book you want is Elyn Saks’s autobiography, The Centre Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness (2007 ...”

“... There is an odd experience that Plato may have had. If light filters into a room through a small enough aperture, anything moving on the street outside will cast its shadow on the ceiling and back wall, and the shadow may have only the most abstract resemblance to the original. Perhaps the human predicament is really like that ...”

“... italics and exclamation-mark seem amply justified when he reports that from February to May 1945 there were on the Western Front ‘five hundred cases of convicted rape a month!’ But matters got worse after the ‘unconditional’ victory. The huge heists of jewels and bullion masterminded by US officers, though they were the biggest known thefts ...”

“... the fact that anti-monumentality was precisely what the New York minimalists – sculptors like Robert Morris, Richard Serra and Donald Judd – so polemically espoused. As Morris put it, they were bent on making neither objects nor monuments. Their art sought an in-between condition, a size, shape and presence intelligible only in the way a work ...”

“... done by honest men. With us, you only kill for reasons of state.’ This is the opinion of Maurice Robert, research director of the French secret service (and later Ambassador to Gabon), as recorded by Faligot and Krop in their excellent and well-researched book. It is difficult to accept such a verdict on the DGSE (originally the BCRA, then the DGER, then the ...”

“... de foie to the sound of trumpets’ – is investigated by Alan Bell with the finding that it may have referred to someone else: but it is hard to detach it from the miser’s greedy son. His appearance was described by one woman in words that would not have disgraced a sally of his own: ‘a mouth like an oyster, and three double chins. I did not hear ...”

“... quite a restricted way. How does the use of sacrifice fit the culture of those who practise it? It may be an important part of some cultural ritual; it may be approved as beneficent, or deplored as a regression to a past state of barbarism. Attitudes towards it may derive from a cultural ...”

“... his eight-year-old daughter. His first wife, assuming he had one and she was the same sort of age, may now be a millionaire, she may own a chain of shops or be a top civil servant or the wife of a duke: but her womb, according to Greer, will be the size of an almond and one thing she won’t have is an eight-year-old ...”