“... our relationship with the actor as the source of our fondness for film. She understands what it means to fall in love with a movie, with a movie star, and is sympathetic to the meanings such devotion creates. She wishes to describe the indescribable, the strange ecstasy of watching and sees this in religious terms, with Clift as a saint, his holiness ...”

“... away by rednecks, the ponderous Wyatt shakes his head: ‘We blew it.’ Billy has no idea what he means, because for him it was always about money, shiny machines, sex and popping into the carnival. I suspect that Hopper didn’t really get it either. This is, surely, the only reading of Easy Rider that can make it an interesting film. It’s seen as a road ...”

“... can’t give the impression of looking inside a mind directly, and must find its own equivalents. David Lean declared that in The Passionate Friends (1949) he had succeeded in photographing thought, though he was referring not to the film as a whole but to one sequence, in which Claude Rains’s character jumps to the conclusion that his wife is having an ...”

“... helps to have a dad who was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rogue, as, variously, Greer, Ackerley, David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many ...”

“... central for British policy-makers even once the Soviets had got the bomb, as they still lacked the means to use it against the US. On the one hand, this situation sent British governments chasing the chimera of civilian nuclear defence. The only time that a Home Secretary – Gwilym Lloyd George in 1955 – took the matter seriously enough to propose a £1.25 ...”

“... Julian Barnes’s diary). He records meeting, in the same week, Princess Margaret, Ionesco and David Hockney. David Bowie offers to take over a part in The Real Thing; the Duchess of Devonshire appears as ‘Debo’ on page 33. Stoppard is not unaware of the effect: ‘I’m getting quite impressed by some of our ...”

“... first-century BC Roman politics: ‘Once upon a time Rome was governed by a triumvirate . . . that means three consuls etc etc,’ as Astérix explains to an understandably bemused Obélix. Uderzo’s form has not always been so poor. Some of his earlier efforts proved to be elegant sequels to the joint series, neatly in tune with the changing politics, and ...”

“... clear out of Russia and leave the Russians to fight it out among themselves’. In Britain, David Lloyd George had similar reservations, but his government included a passionate supporter of the intervention, the newly appointed minister of munitions and soon to be secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill.Wilson’s scepticism meant that the ...”

“... an oath of allegiance to the president and to refrain from political activity; its most important means of political representation, the Centre Party, one of the mainstays of democracy under the Weimar Republic, dissolved itself on 5 July under the threat of Nazi violence and pressure from the Vatican. In return, the rights of the Church were ...”

“... providers, who in contrast will be nurtured into the new terrain’. On this matter at least, David Willetts, the minister responsible for higher education, has been clear: ‘The biggest lesson I have learned is that the most powerful driver of reform is to let new providers into the system.’ Note that word ‘reform’: the implication is that there ...”

“... probably be committed to housework. For people who can pay others to do that, voluntary work is a means of self-definition, a route to status, to MBE or DBE. One of several reasons why P.G. Wodehouse is rather a subversive writer is that much of his best work (he worked assiduously all his long life, and loved it) presents characters who don’t work and ...”

“... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...”

“... speaker at this rally, supposedly organised to fly the flag of resistance to state oppression, was David Icke.Icke was a BBC sports presenter in the 1980s, smooth, bland and remarkable only for a certain glassy coldness of manner. Before that he’d been a professional footballer. At a time when Britain had a handful of TV channels, everyone knew his ...”

“... Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act received royal assent. It ordered a halt to the existing means for dealing with crimes committed during the conflict in Northern Ireland between the late 1960s and 1998. Criminal investigations, inquests and complaints about police conduct were to be abandoned or wound up within a few months; no new civil claims for ...”

“... craft,’ and thus he is often ‘reduced to feeling it as an indulgence’. By craft, Josipovici means something like that of the stonemasons who built the great European cathedrals, or the way Shakespeare treated his own writing, or Bach his composing: as activities related to and requested by the community, often collaborative, artisanal or ...”