“... visiting various moments in her past and getting rid of lingering loads of feeling. Dressed in a black leather suit, she lies in a tub of liquid, receives an injection in her ear and takes off into the past. The soirée we attended was part of the first of her trips.Let’s look at some of this more closely. Periodically we return to the tub of liquid or the ...”

“... Alexander reminded me that Black once said that he was prepared to let his editors have a completely free hand except on one subject. He forbade attacks on American Presidents in general and President Reagan in particular. Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast ...”

“... Hull. His loss isn’t the only topic in Matthew’s poems, or in the poems of his twin brother, Michael, but it is one for which both poets are known – widely known, in the US, as poets go. They have now been introduced to the UK in an unusually designed volume: Brother (Faber, £10.99) contains ten of Michael’s and ...”

“... Practitioners of the black arts of journalism will universally acknowledge that the most accurate as well as the funniest portrayal of their profession is Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop. No one who has ever worked for a paper with a baronial proprietor could fail to recognise Lord Copper and his bevvy of fawning executives ...”

“... but there has been little comparable debate in the UK. Only with the growth of a significant Black population in Britain in the second half of the 20th century has the question of slavery and its legacies been brought into public view. The children of the Windrush wanted to know their history. Establishing it has not been easy, but mainstream accounts ...”

“... starving children of Ethiopia, on the other the wheeler-dealers of the international markets, the Michael Milkens and their hundred million dollar salaries. Michael Lewis deals wittily with the bizarre and shameless world of the wealthy bond-dealers in Liar’s Poker. In Lords of Poverty Graham Hancock looks at the other ...”

“... I swear, I thought I was going to a party.   I had a new suit made of blue corduroy and new black shoes that came with a free pack of playing cards. I was seven years old. What he was actually going to was the Dragon School (his new suit was its uniform), he had just – through inattention, or distracted by TV – missed the parental announcement. In ...”

“... even if she can’t bring herself to take his voice off the answering machine. ‘It’s not black and white,’ Didion remembers a young doctor saying in 1982 about the condition of a niece who was on the point of dying, a proposition that finds its way into Didion’s novel Democracy, where the sceptical and uncrazy heroine says: ‘Not ...”

“... from New Orleans, and only ten miles from the Mexican border. It has a large Latin population, a black ghetto, a corrupt mayor (whose first name was Mayor until he dropped it by deed poll), and an underworld dominated by the shadowy figure of the Dude, who works exclusively through Silent Partners and his answering service. It also has a visiting ...”

“... the subject of much debate. Along the way, Smolin develops many other interesting arguments. From black holes and their thermodynamic properties he deduces that area is in some sense more fundamental in physics than volume (or length). This leads, in turn, to the so-called holographic principle, a belief that the information encoded in the Universe – the ...”

“... eerie and memorable in the movie has to do with this head-on approach. The colours shift into near black-and-white, or into faded, altered versions of shades we think we know. Figures vanish into a fog, only bent silhouettes remaining, as if they were slim relics of a Henry Moore exhibition. The screen goes dark. The screen goes white. A traffic light becomes ...”

“... five years for manslaughter and committed suicide soon after his release. The film opens over black and white footage of police rounding up and beating up gays in the early 1970s. Newspaper headlines fill the screen, the effect is that of an old-time newsreel. Then we cut to Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, looking drained and sorrowful and a little scared, but ...”

“... morning suits, younger brother in smart but more casual clothes. Sister-in-law very tidy in black traditional Japanese dress. Bride cloaked in a mountainous confection of pink and white silk, topped by a hat that looks like a small but heavy monument. When she moves it’s as if a tent were shifting its ground. She kneels before her father, he says she ...”

“... Peeta’s room: he is strapped to his bed, and thrashing about in a crazed fury. The screen goes black, end of movie. Peeta’s brain gets unwashed, but very slowly, and he’s an unreliable ally throughout Mockingjay Part II – at one point he kills a colleague by pushing him into a vast sea of oily lava. I won’t spoil – or do I mean improve – the ...”

“... this decision, as about almost everything else, and his recent movies – Femme Fatale (2002), The Black Dahlia (2006), Redacted (2007), Passion (2012) – are never less than interesting. De Palma has some good comments on the Hollywood system. ‘People are paid a lot of money to get you to do what they want you to do.’ This is by way of excuse for his ...”