“... first film catches the flavour of his very personal brand of humour – off beat, off-the-wall with a cynical twist. Indian teenager Omar, working for his uncle while he waits to go to college, takes over a dingy, run-down laundrette, and tarts it up – with orange walls, fish tanks, hanging ferns, muzak and a glittering, picture-palace neon sign ...”

“... as difficult to envisage as that other deathbed posture – ‘He/she turned his face to the wall.’ What if the bed isn’t by a wall? Actually it’s only men who turn their faces to the wall; women face up to things, peeping over the blanket to the last. 8 July, Thame ...”

“... rather like the boy Wordsworth himself, who, as he much later reported, often ‘grasped at a wall or tree’ on his way to school in order to reassure himself of the material reality of a world he did not entirely believe in. Single sheep were to refute by their superior probability the ‘abyss of idealism’ that threatened to reduce even mountains to ...”

“... Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full Westminster chime, was so appealing that we talked about it on the way home and ...”

“... with Brecht’s short poem ‘The mask of the angry one’, or is it ‘The mask of evil’? On my wall hangs a Japanese carving Mask of an angry demon, lacquered in gold. Feelingly I observe The swollen veins at his temples, hinting What a great strain it is to be angry.Here is what H.R. Hays (1947) has: On my wall hangs a ...”

“... week, a woman was besieged in her home by a group of youths who daubed the word ‘Paedo’ on her wall. She was of course a paediatrician. Whichever way we turn, we see populist measures outlined or tabled by politicians, populist judgments delivered in the courts, and unthinking, vengeful behaviour on the ground. Two cases stand out: those of Myra Hindley ...”

“... were going to have blood on their hands. The offence of the liberals, he claimed bizarrely in the Wall Street Journal, was to advocate judicial oversight of executive decisions about detention: ‘it bears mention that one unintended outcome of a Supreme Court ruling exercising jurisdiction over Guantánamo detainees may be that, in the future, capture of ...”

“... as Lord Camden said in the North Briton case, the eye cannot trespass, the answer was to build a wall. If you had no property you had no privacy. The law was no better advanced when in 1990 the actor Gorden Kaye, who was seriously ill in hospital when journalists conned their way into his room, tried to get some redress. His counsel conceded, and the court ...”

“... 16 years as an émigré, and returned to Berlin only to clash with the East German apparatchiks. Stephen Parker’s superb biography of a great iconoclastic writer is impressively sourced, rich in detail, well-paced, highly readable yet serious. His Brecht was chastened by the dark times, but remained what his friend and stage designer Caspar Neher called ...”

“... Last May Stephen Greenblatt, who was then president of the Modern Languages Association, the literary academic’s equivalent of the Teamsters, circulated a letter among its twenty thousand or so members. ‘Over the last few decades,’ he wrote, ‘most departments of language and literature have come to demand that junior faculty members produce, as a condition for being seriously considered for promotion to tenure, a full-length book published by a reputable press ...”

“... might have to exercise more than hemispheric control became urgent during the Second World War, as Stephen Wertheim has recently shown in Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy. After the Fall of France, US war planners began to consider the implications of living in a world of protected economic zones, with Europe under Hitler’s control and ...”

“... stories about ethnic quotas on syllabuses were invading the otherwise unliterary pages of the Wall Street Journal, the last edition of the Norton took pains to deny that ‘the editors of the anthology simply reproduce, or even help establish, the traditional “canon” of English literature,’ The new edition’s more nuanced preface points out that ...”

“... Jerome in his Study he plants his reader at the door to his own study in Quebec. There on the wall is old Saint Jerome in Nuremberg circa 1514, bundled up against the cold with his inkpot and quill, his slippers and his crucifix. Despite the centuries which have passed (to say nothing of the lion which is snoozing on the floor), we could still walk into ...”

“... such as this. The London Review of Books, which has been publishing some of the high-class work of Stephen Sackur, a BBC radio reporter of the Gulf War and the Middle East generally, has recently brought out in paperback a collection of these pieces under the title On the Basra Road. * Radio and television reporters can be divided into those whom one would ...”