“... Without Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian, there would be no Belgrano affair, and doubtless Mr Clive Ponting OBE would be plying his way, ever upwards, in the Ministry of Defence. This is no exaggeration. Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on ...”

“... hear in me the funeral voices call out transcendentally, when in German style the bands go beating by. At a mad shiver of my vertebrae if I sob like a lost man, it’s that I hear the funeral voices call out transcendentally. As a ghostly gallop of zebras my dream goes strangely prowling and I am so haunted that in me always, inside my darknesses I hear the ...”

“... band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the ...”

“... the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) and West Ham, under the majority ownership of David Gold and David Sullivan, two businessmen who had made their money from pornography, agreed that the club would acquire a 99-year lease on the Olympic stadium. By then, West Ham had gone ...”

“... in a brand-new, sharp-focus print at the National Film Theatre and the Screen on the Hill, was a David O. Selznick film, ‘a picturisation’ as the title credits have it, of a very successful novel. ‘We bought Rebecca,’ Selznick wrote in a memo objecting strenuously to a first draft of the screenplay, ‘and we intend to make Rebecca.’ That was the ...”

“... Frankenstein’s real achievement was to create life – out of bits and pieces of dead bodies to be sure. In Scott’s movie a creature who looks not like Victor but an athletic version of his creature drinks a small carton of what appears to be chilli sauce, and bursts apart, spreading his DNA all over the ...”

“... Square was emblazoned with the words: ‘This is not a coup’. He didn’t say what else it might be, but soon enough others did. A second revolution, a ‘people’s coup’, a ‘re-colution’: terms coined to describe how the events felt to them, or perhaps to bridge the discomfiting gap between experience and reality. It’s not the first time a coup in ...”

“... Attempts to alter the government’s policy on tuition fees have failed. Dreamed up by Labour, then embraced by the new Coalition government, the proposed reforms triggered large student demonstrations, but these had no impact on any constituency of real influence either in the universities or in politics ...”

“... too, but also excited. But then the patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a ...”

“... the centre of attention. But it is a curious phenomenon even so: hundreds of people transfixed by the presence of an artist whose appearance is as distinct and as recognisable as his work. Self-portrait by Annibale Carracci (c.1575) Portrait of the Artist, an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery (until 17 ...”

“... claims in his biographical account of Verrocchio, and it makes perfect sense. Indeed, it may be the only way to explain the two paintings in the National Gallery that have long been associated with Verrocchio. ‘Tobias and the Angel’ (c.1470). Tobias and the Angel (c.1470) may be an appealing composition, but it ...”

“... Until this week I had read no work written by G.M. Trevelyan since my schooldays. No Cambridge supervisor that I can recall ever recommended any of his books, and I have certainly never prescribed them to my own students. Like most people, I knew – or thought I knew – that he had defined social history as ‘history with the politics left out’, and that he was one of the chief stuffed carcasses in the mausoleum of Whig history ...”

“... Guest’s starting-point is Donald Davie’s suggestion in 1958 that Christopher Smart might be considered ‘the greatest poet between Pope and Wordsworth’. Her intelligent and carefully argued book does not deliver quite the far-reaching reassessment of Smart’s status Davie must have had in mind. He wanted Smart to ...”

“... spewing. Just so you know. Humble Pie Various flavours recite us. Meanwhile the inevitable Caspar David Friedrich painting of a ship pointing somehow upward has slipped in like fog, surrounding us with vowels of regret for the things we did not do rising like a great shout above the rain barrel. I was going to say I kissed you once when you were asleep, and ...”

“... Thomas projected a trilogy and a quartet. In the event, ‘Russian Nights’ has turned out to be five novels long. Five novels too long, some might say. Thomas admits in his preface that ‘I kept changing my mind about whether the work was finished. I should have realised that an author does not decide this; the work itself decides, ...”