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“... military and diplomatic historian to treat his subject in vacuo. It is the great strength of both Ian Christie’s Wars and Revolutions and Geoffrey Holmes’s discussion of the Augustan professions that they each, in their different ways, avoid any such insularity of approach. Christie’s book is a ...”

“... about its audiences, buildings, distributors and publicists as it is about the films themselves. Ian Christie notes in The Last Machine (1994) that until around 1907 people didn’t visit the cinema with the idea of seeing a particular film. Audiences were captivated by the novelty of moving pictures: a baby having breakfast, a train arriving at a ...”

“... Wim Wender’s very pleasurable Paris, Texas (1984) is both an American movie and a European film. Its creative pedigree is mixed – all through the credits: the German Wenders as director, the American Sam Shepard as writer; the German Robby Müller as cinematographer, the American Ry Cooder as composer/performer of the music; the American actors Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell as the central Henderson brothers, the French Aurore Clément and the German Nastassia Kinski as their wives ...”

“... quality and rigour of a 2003 TV drama-documentary can be judged from a statement by its director, Ian Lilley, that ‘it was hard to pin down what the Angry Brigade stood for because their communiqués were quite unintelligible.’ One reputable and another considerable book have now been produced, however, or more accurately reproduced, which deal with what ...”

“... have gone in for ‘experiment’, from James, Ford and Conrad and Joyce to, say, Golding and Ian McEwan. Lawrence saw how much might be done in a novel, how free it could be of constraints, how apt to the business of making it new; the novel was protean, insisting on its own virtually infinite possibilities, experimental in its very nature. Johnson was ...”

“... in any such sub-Freudianisms. I even have some trouble with Ludovic Kennedy’s theory that Christie, the multiple sex-killer, was influenced by the phallic factory chimneys opposite his childhood bedroom in Halifax and then adjacent to 10 Rillington Place, where he murdered and buried his victims. But the professor would surely acknowledge ...”

“... it, ‘a classic of bibliographical detection, a thousandfold more exciting than anything Agatha Christie and her kind ever penned’. It’s a generous compliment, but inexact. In the first place, as I have said, it is not clear what crime Wise committed by uttering his forgeries, or by making money out of them. Secondly, Agatha ...”

“... read all the detective stories there ever were, I should think,’ a character says in Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House. ‘Nothing else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ My back is OK but I’ve spent the last 15 months reading detective fiction, most of it written between the late 1920s and the mid-1950s, an extended survey of the genre’s ...”

“... of deaths and suicides announces the final surrender of the Golden Age Murder Mystery: Agatha Christie force-fed on Pevsner and the humbug of Kenneth Baker’s latest flag-waving anthology. A sub-genre that has always been profoundly conservative (hence its popularity, up there with P.G. Wodehouse, in America) is reduced to editorialised sound-bites from ...”

“... his baby daughter, who had in fact been killed, as had Evans’s wife, by the serial killer John Christie – Evans would now be recognised as a vulnerable defendant – to the more humane spirit in which trials are conducted today. There is still rhetoric, but the register of persuasive speech is more often conversational than grandiloquent (although I have ...”

“... of state public employees, Walker responded with sycophantic alacrity to a prank call placed by Ian Murphy, a reporter for the Buffalo Beast, who convinced Walker that he was David Koch, the mega-billionaire funder of the Tea Party. The faux-Koch suggested an outlandish series of Nixonian stunts to attack the unions, including the planting of pro-Walker ...”

“... or eighty years’. For a while he made one exception: Beckett. Then he discovered Johnson, whose Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry bore a puff from ‘the great man’. ‘Knowing almost nothing about contemporary British writing’, Coe was ‘more than ready to concur with B.S. Johnson’s theories about the modern novel. Yes, of course it was all ...”

“... inflation of Dimblebys, a lobotomy of Heavy Metal percussionists, Daphne du Maurier, Dame Agatha Christie – then, finally, his voice rasping with emotion, a raven’s croak of intensely local pride ... the birthplace of Bill Giles, television weatherman, cold front pundit, guru of the wind-chill factor. A meaningful silence advects along the deck as we ...”

“... As an example of this kind of text, he cited the James Bond novels. Eco’s approach to Ian Fleming in this book was welcome for its critical gusto and its sense that he had really enjoyed the novels (by a sweet irony, Sean Connery would later take the lead in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film of The Name of the Rose). But he maintained, nonetheless, a ...”

“... noticeable changes in tone and register. In 1975 the DUP’s co-founder and leader, the Reverend Ian Paisley, referred to the Virgin Mary as ‘the Madonna of the Common Market’. The DUP has remained robustly opposed to the dangers of a ‘European super-state’, though there is no longer the same obsessive concern with the colour of the pope’s ...”