“... from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was interred with him, and they were joined in their ...”

“... He has killed her erstwhile pimp (Gary Oldman being allowed to overact as if he was the Anthony Hopkins of the underworld) because he didn’t like the idea of the man’s continued existence, and because it’s what he thinks Elvis would have done. When Slater tells Arquette he has killed Oldman, she starts to cry, and Slater gets upset. Is she grieving ...”

“... She was friendly with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and Roth met Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, James T. Farrell and Thomas Wolfe at her salon on 61 Morton Street. She set out to make an intellectual of him in the manner of Henry Higgins, Kellman says, and he suspects that her mentoring of young Jewish men – Roth and Winter weren’t the only ones – was ...”

“... brings aspects of his work into sharper focus without unduly cleaning up its oddness and irony. James Gordon Farrell – Jim to his friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonald Fraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like the empty swimming-pools and ...”

“... and wondering why their own environments felt so drab and unpromising as possible subject-matter. Hopkins had the answer to this predicament: admire and do otherwise – a recipe, however, which is more easily assented to than followed. The classic account of imprisonment by admiration is Ted Solotaroff’s essay, ‘Silence, Exile and ...”

“... near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’. Eliot had referred in 1918 to Henry James’s ‘merciless clairvoyance’ as a perception of relations rather than entities: ‘It is in the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that ...”

“... descendants of New England free African Americans, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and the novelist Pauline Hopkins, began documenting their own and others’ Revolutionary War pedigree. Jews also started to publish family histories, create archives and found organisations such as the 1934 Society of Americans of Jewish Descent. Two women, one Cherokee-Creek, the other ...”

“... when it eventually came back to Stonyhurst it must have been seen if not worn by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who taught there. A propos Henry VII, what happened between 1485 and 1500? How did bold Harry Tudor of Bosworth Field turn into the crabbed penny-pinching accountant that is his usual representation? 24 March. A film beginning with a man being shepherded ...”

“... in his diaries, it seems Forster regretted his own lack of ‘the pictorial outlook’. Reading Hopkins’s poems in 1924, he sees himself by contrast as always ‘engaged in carnality, intellect, humour, kindness: never bothering to record the aesthetic’. In his seventies he was still taking up an old worry about his own powers of seeing. In a note ...”

“... Remains of the Day from the same year, in which a monstrously repressed butler, played by Anthony Hopkins – ‘the servant, the bondsman’ – finds his life’s work in the unquestioning service he performs for Lord Darlington, an aristocratic English Nazi, played by James Fox. ‘Let us make a film in which the ...”

“... the painter himself did not seem to mind. Among those who came to his studio were Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Millington Synge, whose work he would defend vehemently; he met the young James Joyce, who declared him ‘very loquacious’. If Yeats liked someone, he made a sketch of them or even a portrait. He was not too ...”

“... have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in the ...”