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“... I noticed him say ‘undergrowths’ where we should have used the singular. We talked of D.L. Ray, who died this year – Bengal’s most popular poet. I asked if it was true that D.L. Ray said his Bengali was bad? ‘Oh, yes. He hated my work. We used to be very friendly, but of late years had little intercourse. He ...”

“... claims about why and how things have changed. What they write can be challenged by facts. A new X-ray or a contemporary inventory may destroy the argument a group of paintings was chosen to illustrate. Critics, by contrast, invent categories which facts cannot invalidate. For example, Kenneth Clark’s distinction between the naked and the nude stands as long ...”

“... World of the Simple’. Here are some samples from each category. The man who mistook his wife for a hat was a distinguished musician, learned and charming, who had, through damage to his visual cortex, lost the ability to recognise familiar things despite being quite capable of seeing them; he couldn’t associate the visual ...”

“... in Rome for ten years. It was still snowing when I found wedged behind a cupboard a cranial X-ray of the previous occupant of the flat. He had had a fractured skull. He too was an Englishman; he too had sustained a haematoma. All this happened in 1983. Last autumn, I began to experience severe headaches. Household painkillers made no difference. My GP ...”

“... this turned out to be wrong. Steinbeck, ‘philosophically’ convinced of the perfectibility of man, considered the migrants ‘backward and uneducated’, and in The Grapes of Wrath ‘supported reforms inconsistent with the migrants’ own desires’. Similarly, the folklorists Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin, sent west under the aegis of Alan Lomax and ...”

“... and this odd-seeming conjunction is often fleshed out with more disreputable terms such as ‘con man’ or ‘adventurer’. He is also described as Oscar Wilde’s nephew, which is true up to a point: he was the nephew of Wilde’s wife, Constance. As a writer, Cravan had a brief and stormy career, in Paris, in the years around the outbreak of the First ...”

“... talks he delivered in Italy during the war. He remained at St Elizabeth’s for 12 years. The old man McLuhan and Kenner saw there wasn’t insane. He was the same brilliant, manipulative, unrepentant fascist and antisemite he had always been and remained until his death, despite occasional public disavowals (‘My worst mistake was that stupid, suburban ...”

“... of speech, François Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1994) presented a man who was abnormally articulate – one who in the 22nd film, for example, rehearses the revealing personal ad: ‘Friendly, companionably reclusive, socially unacceptable, alcoholically abstemious, tirelessly talkative, zealously unzealous, spiritually ...”

“... crab. I, pink flower mantis. I, swallowtail. I, prairie dog. I, locust. I, capercailzie. I, manta ray. I, rattlesnake. I, sycamore. I, manatee. I, honeybee. I, saddleback. I, lamprey. I, coelocanth. I, okapi. I, salmon. I, snapper. I, fire. I, anolis lizard. I, orchid. I, tree ...”

“... for instance, or the busy, modern general hospital where I once saw a young doctor looking at X-ray plates upside down. On quiet days I read through stacks of clinical files, getting a purchase on arcane abbreviations and summary prognoses. On foot or by bus I visited the streets and towns around, to report on the home conditions of families desperate for ...”

“... to pick up a briefcase on a train and deliver it to the right place. His therapist has made a new man of him, keen to look on the bright side (the Monty Python allusion isn’t made in the film, but it comes to mind anyway). He talks about peace and ‘the toxicity of anger’, and says: ‘Every job I do, somebody dies. I’m not that guy anymore.’ Bullock ...”

“... had killed herself. For him, the intrusive camera movement was a serious moral trespass: ‘The man who decides at this moment to track forward and reframe the dead body in a low-angle shot … deserves only the most profound contempt.’ This passionate application of moral criteria to an aesthetic device struck Daney forcibly: ‘Over the years “the ...”

“... for the real now searches for distraction. Snooker on television is the moral Equivalent of war. Man against man, It is a pitiless yet bloodless quarrel Racking the nerves behind the deadened pan. Slowly a break accumulates like coral Yet has the logic of a battle plan. Fought out on a flat sea within four walls Well has ...”

“... so it seems best to say ‘favourite film directors’ instead – Renoir, Gance, Eisenstein, Ray, Truffaut, Keaton, Vigo, Tati. Tati has lately died after a career triumphant beyond compare in comic quality, apart perhaps from Keaton. Both could have made films in broom cupboards. Keaton used his august and stoic profile as a sort of mainsail, braced ...”

“... Go to A&E? Perhaps it can be avoided. A few weeks ago, he had a similar pain, and an abdominal X-ray showed no cause for alarm. He lies down. The pain ebbs. We spend a restless night, turning and muttering, waiting for Monday when crisis is more convenient. In the late afternoon he sees his GP. She sends him to hospital with a note. He can hardly stand ...”