“... never have been aborted, no matter the possible outcome (probably a bloodbath in Tehran). I was a child at the time, living in Mashhad, three hundred miles north of Tabas. The Islamic Republic broadcast images of the incinerated wreckage of the aircraft on TV and invoked the Elephant (Al-Fil) chapter of the Quran to explain the ‘miraculous’ US defeat. In ...”

“... Marlon Brando could be a paraplegic after the war, he could be Zapata, Napoleon, a mafia don, or Lee Clayton, swanning around the Missouri Breaks country in a dress, a bonnet and an italic Irish accent. He might be a used-up ex-boxer on the Jersey docks. Or an actor pretending to be that punchdrunk bum few of us would care to notice in life. We’d rather ...”

“... sound like one. She sounds like a hammy male actor in late middle age – perhaps Christopher Lee in his prime, or Simon Callow. She is Gin Rathbone, and she introduces herself with these fine words: ‘I am a tall, thin, untidy Englishwoman, I drink too much and yes, I suppose I am rather – oh, detached – distant, aloof – snobbish, even, I have ...”

“... when I haven’t heard a word, I sit halfway down the south aisle festooned in hearing aids in the lee of a plaque to Flora Robson. But someone must have taken the acoustics in hand because if anything it’s too noisy and I turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst ...”

“... theory is that the key to the assassination is to be found in the CIA’s relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald, a relationship whose existence the CIA has always denied while acknowledging that it maintained a routine file on him. Morley thinks the Agency is lying and suspects that Angleton was running an operation involving Oswald which was tangled up ...”

“... hardly be accounted a community when the keynote of the book is isolation. Spoon River in Edgar Lee Masters’s book of poems is a place of hypocrisy and double-dealing where only the dead can tell the truth from their graves. Part of the enduring appeal of It’s a Wonderful Life for cinema and television audiences can be put down to its sense of how easy ...”

“... Sodom and Gomorrah because ‘we probably have the most adulterers living here in California, child pornographers and molesters ... and divorce, family break-ups, all of that evil.’ Davis, too, returns to Biblical literalism because ‘the Bible, as three eminent seismologists recently pointed out, is superb environmental ...”

“... liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ begins to fade when he is wrongly suspected of abducting a child, and traduced in the local media. An illegal Chinese immigrant, whose idea of the States is derived entirely from videos, is perplexed to discover poverty and destitution. A woman who conducts virtual city tours for an online realtor (GetaShack.com) finds ...”

“... the ‘born in the wrong body’ mantra which, while deeply felt by many trans people, is also the child of a medical profession which for a long time would accept nothing less as the basis for hormonal or surgical intervention. In the 1960s, the profiles of candidates for medical transition were found to be strangely in harmony with Harry Benjamin’s then ...”

“... never have occurred naturally.’ This may be the most important point in Rees’s important book. Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cosmos insists that our cosmos is unified in a way once thought unique to living beings. Einstein’s general relativity is Machian, which means (to use a traditional way of making the point) that it attributes a car’s ...”

“... At best, the incoherence can be interpreted as evidence he’s a gormless, love-hungry 70-year-old child, a sort of feral president, an evil Chauncey Gardiner, as much the dupe in his own confidence scheme as he is its perpetrator, and utterly at the mercy of whichever voice just whispered in his ear. The other possibility, that he’s a totally Machiavellian ...”

“... which still dominate the English novel. Heralded by commendatory quotes from Tom McCarthy and Lee Rourke on the cover of this new gathering of previously uncollected or unpublished writings, Ann Quin now seems to be emerging as their best ancestor. She has all the biographical qualifications for the job of precursor, as well as being famously and ...”

“... were (of course) her parents, her home town of Melbourne and Roman Catholicism. An eldest child, Greer got on unevenly with both her parents, while re-enacting in her own way their respective peculiarities. Her mother Peggy was a one-time milliner who made stabs at reinventing herself by working hard on her tan and sewing unconventional ...”

“... when everything should have been all right, she went on a family picnic in the western desert; her child picked up a camouflaged bomb and was killed. I hadn’t heard of any of the artists in the Art et Liberté exhibition, which for its stint at Tate Liverpool has been called Surrealism in Egypt (until 18 March). I hadn’t even heard that such a movement had ...”

“... of conscience, a hodge-podge of the stiffest gestures of Gary Cooper and James Stewart. Tommy Lee Jones, the suave gay New Orleans businessman caught up in all kinds of nasty deals, is so deeply untrustworthy that you can’t take your eyes off him; everything he does is full of sleaze and interest. Donald Sutherland, by contrast, as the top military man ...”