“... 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 ...”

“... instance, permits a Christian inmate to have a minister kneeling beside him. But when Domineque Ray requested that his imam be allowed, the court ordered that Ray be executed without spiritual counsel.So the court could go either way in Ramirez’s case. Whatever the result, it will not be decided by the text of the law ...”

“... Baume​ ’s first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), took the form of a love letter from Ray, a 57-year-old recluse, to his vicious rescue dog One Eye. Her new book, A Line Made by Walking, is narrated by Frankie, a 26-year-old artist who has a nervous breakdown, and stows away in her dead grandmother’s bungalow ‘on the brow of a yawning ...”

“... Federated States of Micronesia. It was a city of islands, a miniature Micronesia consisting of 92 man-made bits of land. Micronesia itself is made up of 607 islands, of which the city of Palikir on Pohnpei is the capital. There is only one way for civilians to get to Pohnpei and most of the other islands in Micronesia. United Airlines Flight 154 takes off ...”

“... and ‘artificial’ as most dramatic performances, and that the problem ‘for modern man’ is ‘breaking free from conventions and learning how to really feel again’. I’m quoting from Cassavetes on Cassavetes, edited by Ray Carney, who sees this as ‘a daring leap: lived experience could be as much a ...”

“... camera, the fast editing, and the airy sense that in the right kind of film nothing can get a bad man down. Everything is accident and freedom, until the last accident, which is death. Our man casually kills a policeman because he can; because there is a gun in the car he has stolen; because he wants to be a gangster; and ...”

“... of the sick, As irritant as the cough’s dry rhetoric. Those hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray Or test (while you read novels two a day) Already with a kind of clumsy stealth Distanced you from the habits of your health.   In hope still, courteous still, but tired and thin, You tried to stay the man that you had ...”

“... chapter. An English airline offering cheap flights from Riyadh to London discovered that the man who’d translated the ad into Arabic had taken advantage of the opportunity to advertise his brother-in-law’s restaurant on the Edgware Road at the same time. Not so much a marketing disaster as a triumph, I’d say. In its own, rather more modest way, the ...”

“... camp in Sound Beach, Connecticut. One of them was Walt Disney. The other, only 15 years old, was Ray Kroc, the man who later made McDonald’s an empire. When Kroc and his comrades went off to the nearest town on furlough to look for girls, Disney stayed in camp, drawing. Disney served in France and Germany, but the First ...”

“... they scored 52 in all, the fewest runs ever in a home Test (46 from the bat; the splendid Ray Lindwall 6 for 20). The Australian openers were past this shameful mark inside the hour. Don Bradman wasn’t needed until after tea, when he came emotively in at his usual first wicket down. Because he had said that this would be his last Test Match here, he ...”

“... who cannot but bring steadiness and grace and decency to the role, and we have to see him as a man who has almost psychotically learned to concentrate on his trade and not its effects, on his family and no one else, and to permit himself even murder in the name of fidelity and straight dealing. He has inherited a crime empire from his boss and ...”

“... paternal grandfather, was a tall, blue-eyed blond – as one historian recently put it, ‘a white man with a Hispanic name’. He took his doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago in 1936, then went to Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, where he was based for the rest of his academic career.Lawrence built cyclotrons, complex instruments ...”

“... at her own beauty. In Ovid, Narcissus is young, ‘able to be seen as either a boy or a young man’. He is also a fool, vain and deceived. He plunges his arms into the stream but cannot grasp his image. He is a victim of divine vengeance. His death is predicted by Tiresias (like Milton a blind seer), and he eventually turns into a flower. Even his name ...”

“... money to pay for his funeral. Throughout his long and laborious life, Brown remained a family man. He was never free from the anxieties and griefs which went with the responsibilities of having a dependent family. On the other hand, he never had to do without their unfaltering loyalty and support. They were the source of the sturdy confidence that enabled ...”