“... lives. Scotland is a place where cultural artefacts and past battles – the Stone of Destiny, Robert Burns, Braveheart, Bannockburn – have more impact on people’s sense of moral action than politics does. The people have no real commitment to the public sphere, and are not helped towards any such commitment by the dead rhetoric of the ...”

“... a voice-over commentary. This is quite different, however, from the documentary form originated by Robert Flaherty in the 1920s and which is still employed in a large proportion of the films labelled as ‘ethnographic’. In these, a group of characters are followed through a series of activities arranged according to the dramaturgical requirements of a ...”

“... expected is the scope of the extra-vehicular ‘education’ Wardaddy seems ready to offer the young man. As the crews relax after taking a small town, Wardaddy leads Norman into a building where they find two women, Irma (Anamaria Marinca) and her young cousin Emma (Alicia von Rittberg). While Irma fries the eggs ...”

“... Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a worthwhile place to be is immensely heartening. The British Council can still be thought a bit of a joke but like the World Service it’s a more useful investment of ...”

“... the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a proud Amazon, armoured and helmeted, repulsing European foes and civilising barbarians is, these days, according to ...”

“... is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I trotted out years later when Romola Christopherson was taking me round Downing Street. ‘I suppose for Mrs Thatcher,’ I sneered, ‘Piper is the acceptable face of ...”

“... and in June 1951 sailed to France with his wife of four months, Patsy Southgate. His cover – young writer at work on a novel – had the virtue of being true. He was 24 and the Atlantic Monthly had just published his first short story.‘Sadie’ is set in rural Georgia and narrated by a man called Webster who goes to a stable yard because he wants to ...”

“... tries to rise to as a correspondent, giving exquisite elegies for old friends like Mrs Kemble and Robert Louis Stevenson; even the noble, scrupulous and harrowing account of his loved sister’s last days and hours is improved by an altered phrase. Some things probably came near to defeating him, though he records them desperately. Professor Edel chooses to ...”

“... sun’s early light revealing not bands of merry shepherds tripping blithely to the fields, but a young chimney-sweep preparing to remove the accumulated filth of coal fires; a maid creeping back to her own bed after a night spent in her master’s (filth, to Swift, of a not unrelated kind); and a handful of schoolboys dawdling with their satchels, reluctant ...”

“... subsequent books had been well received, but it was North that really established him: it prompted Robert Lowell to declare him the best Irish poet since Yeats, and he was widely celebrated by the London reviewers, who seemed on the whole untroubled by the suggestion that the Irish might be constitutionally disposed to killing one another. Heaney didn’t ...”

“... When in his late teens and early twenties he began his career in London, people noted how ‘young and schoolboyish’ he was. His diaries from that time record enthusiasms for the novels of J.M. Barrie and Arthur Ransome, for Emil and the Detectives and The Sword in the Stone. And he was much pre-occupied with writing a string quartet about his ...”

“... to first nights’; while kept women, like ‘female minotaurs’, were ‘devouring’ France’s young men. There was also the practical, medical problem of limiting the spread of venereal disease. Du Camp knew what he was talking about: in Egypt he had endured three doses of VD to Flaubert’s one. And for all his moral disapproval, his attitude to ordinary ...”

“... façade of Lucy’s Edwardian middle-class life? What are they? What are they really? They are a young woman and a young man in Italy for goodness sake, and doesn’t death make that gloriously apparent?One could, at least at first, mistake Checkout 19 for a story of coming-of-age via literature, a genre so often done ...”

“... there, and then, still convalescent from illness, only because of an aberrant desire to meet the young Queen Elizabeth during her tour of the Antipodes in 1954. She charmed him. Stricken by remorse for a lifetime of stiffnecked pride, he dragged himself again from his sickbed on the following Sunday to seek forgiveness at the nearest church. He died from a ...”

“... obsessed with the cinema, and with American rock music in those favouring Sixties. They started young and went to film school, directing their first features at the end of that decade, each thus joining a rising group of film-makers: Scorsese associated with America’s ‘Movie-Brats’ (Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas), Wenders with the ‘New German ...”