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“... from analogue special effects, and it was fun to see him using it to address significant absences. Michael J. Anderson, the Little Man from Another Place, refused to appear after a quarrel about his fee, so his character was replaced by a screeching shrub. The character played by David Bowie, who died before he could shoot his scenes, now lived in a sort of ...”

“... urine was dark, her stools were loose, her back was visibly stiff, and she ignored her whimpering young son. She then sought out a little shrub, Vernonia amygdalina, the ‘bitter-leaf’ or ‘goat-killer’. Chausiki stripped away the highly toxic outer layers of its shoots. For twenty minutes she chewed and sucked the more mildly poisonous inner pith. The ...”

“... endorse this: ‘The books here on my shelves have countless examples of similar behaviour.’When Michael Ryan murdered 14 people in Hungerford in 1987 (and then killed himself), the idea was put about that he’d been motivated by watching Rambo videos. That someone could, apparently without motive, massacre strangers on the streets of a Berkshire town was ...”

“... kidnappers’ leaders. Another, one of two girls, has a gift for languages, and meets Hosokawa’s young polyglot translator in the china cupboard for romantic midnight reading lessons. If this all sounds too cosily implausible, it is, but to give Patchett the benefit of the doubt for a moment, perhaps it’s meant to be: she obviously didn’t set out to ...”

“... this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and son Freddy (five), worried because he had been unable to resist giving Freddy a kiss. Freddy is still at infants’ school. Had Rupert been vaccinated when I was, we ...”

“... leave Eton and retire to King’s, ‘where he entertained the undergraduates and helped dozens of young sailors, soldiers, errand boys and others down on their luck.’ The correspondence of Browning, preserved in the modern archive at King’s, shows rather a strong if vicarious preference for the Navy. His habit was to send off his ...”

“... were Lithuanian Jews who settled in the East End and made the familiar move to Hampstead; that the young Goodman’s environment, though far from rich, was civilised, offering good food, good music, much kindness and a tolerance of learning. (These Jewish origins, and a continuing fidelity to the culture, are important, though David Selbourne, as his title ...”

“... presence. From the mid-19th century until the 1940s, the nocturnal shuttlings of such groups of young men and women were known as ‘monkey runs’: their routes formed circles and triangles, with one sex on each side of the road and countless halts in shop doorways. Passers-by complained to the papers about jostling and rowdiness. But the Manchester ...”

“... and The Skull Beneath the Skin, in which the investigator’s role is filled by Cordelia Gray, the young proprietor of a London detective agency, and heroine of an earlier adventure, recounted in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1971). Innocent Blood, like Barbara Vine’s A Dark-Adapted Eye, is centred on a bygone killing and its perpetrator (a woman sentenced ...”

“... of a far more illustrious progeny), going on to J.R. Cozens (who went mad) and Girtin (who died young), and eventually reaching a triumphant climax with the work of J.M.W. Turner. The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880, on view at the Royal Academy until 12 April, sets out to recycle this rather tired old story in a manner that remains remarkably ...”

“... Two people I knew have died: Maurice Berger, an art critic, curator and civil rights activist; and Michael Sorkin, the radical architect and critic. A friend at the Whitney told me of a staff member in his late forties, a father of two, who had died of the virus.The pain of social distancing and isolation isn’t negligible, but neither is it lethal, and in ...”

“... the setting of an alarm clock, is made worth watching. Heimat has in it the departure of a young husband, the isolation of his grass widow, and then the departure of her son by another man. In the second departure – which is linked to a love affair of the son’s and to his espousal of the advanced art of electronic music – Reitz’s own ...”

“... As​ a young researcher applying for a US visa to go to a conference in the mid-1960s, I presented myself at the fortress-like embassy in Grosvenor Square and ticked the boxes affirming that I was not nor ever had been a member of the Communist Party and did not intend to attempt to overthrow the US government by force ...”

“... In his story​ ‘The Student’, Chekhov writes of a young seminarian who comes across two widows warming themselves at a fire: And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown … in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression – all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better ...”

“... Mabon ap Gwynfor, has championed the council tax rise, arguing that the ‘displacement of young people from communities because of the second homes proliferation will worsen if the government continues to hesitate and take half-measures.’ The Senedd register of members’ interests reveals that ap Gwynfor himself has a second home – a rental ...”