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“... first book, A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735), an excellent and little-noticed edition of which, by Joel Gold, appeared in 1985. They come at the conclusion of a distressing episode in which an ‘old Mahometan troublemaker, ‘the master of our camels’, is caught stealing some tent cords. When the travellers seek to retrieve them, he and the other ...”

“... chores on board a ship. Graef makes a meal out of this trip to Belgium and France. The story of Joel, a drug offender, somehow brings in the tale of the ship’s captain – a bearded cynic in his mid-forties who has done time for fraud – and you’re left wondering what is what. The basic problem with Living Dangerously is the impression it gives that ...”

“... The story of the South African gold and diamond fields and of the men who rose to wealth and notoriety as a result of their exploitation has stimulated writers since the 1870s, when diamonds were first discovered. And yet amongst the millions of words there are curious lacunae, particularly in the area of biography ...”

“... Joel and Ethan Coen often look like moviemakers in search of a movie; as if their perfect film were waiting for them out there and they had to do something while they were looking for it. What else could have driven them to their 2004 remake of the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers? Even if Tom Hanks is funnier in that film than our idea of Tom Hanks ought to allow, he’s not Alec Guinness ...”

“... so obvious what the characters are thinking that they might as well be shouting. As in the Billy Joel song they are sharing a drink they call loneliness but it’s better than drinking alone. The first person we see in the film talks a bit but we learn far more from what we see of him and around him. He’s a drug dealer checking in with one of his boys on ...”

“... Cogburn into a genial version of a grizzled movie star acting tough while showing his heart of gold. Wayne got an Oscar for this performance, although ‘performance’ perhaps isn’t quite the word. Seen again now, the film doesn’t seem as bad as I remembered it being, and it has touches of genuine darkness. The hanging scene taken from the novel is ...”

“... Dennis Mitchell after winning a 100-metres heat and Michael Johnson after taking the 200-metre gold – puffed out their chests and pulled their jerseys to display the national emblem. Only Americans accused an Irish swimmer of using drugs when she won the Olympic gold. Only an eliminated American boxer, Fernando ...”

“... allegory of the populist movement of the late 19th century, which wanted to use silver as well as gold to back the dollar, thus increasing the money supply. The resulting inflation would put ‘free silver’ in the hands of the ‘common man’, like the Dakota farmer. In this reading, Dorothy represents the Kansas agronomists, while her silver shoes (they ...”

“... too, must surely be ‘by Preston Sturges’. Who else?Enter our hero, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), acclaimed director of hit comedies and musicals, who’s about to tell the studio bosses that he’s done with the motley mountebank malarkey. He wants instead to make a film of a grittily realist social protest novel titled O Brother, Where Art ...”

“... his best suit, he mislays the new poem he is to present to the King, carelessly leaves a purse of gold in a cab and has to be reminded that the strange young man who speaks to him is his son. Dumas père gave him a walk-on part in the final episode of his Musketeer saga and turned him into a twittering buffoon. For Barbey d’Aurevilley, he was ‘an amoral ...”

“... presence to their lover by printing greetings in the New York Times, presenting him with engraved gold cufflinks, or, as Mrs Harris did, writing droll verses congratulating him on the long list of his conquests. They would be forced into these strategems because their telephone calls to Dr Tarnower, which were numerous and very frequent, were not always well ...”

“... S.J. Perelman, the writer Edward Paramore, a popular ladies’ man, hooked what Sayre’s father, Joel, described to her in a letter as an ‘eerie Will-Beebish object’, purplish and fronded. Perelman identified it as ‘a marine vulva’. As for the ‘athletic, activist’ drinking that went on in such circles (with its concomitant scorn for ‘thimble ...”

“... atlas in which the Land of Matrimony lies at the centre and has both a Slave Coast and a Gold Coast. Surrounded by an Ocean of Love, it can only be reached from Singletown in Friesland by way of many hazards and even when it is gained, there is a clear view of the offshore island of Divorce. Johnson stood by his female authors, or ‘literary ...”

“... die; two-headed babies are shown in jars by the men of the travelling fair. The 13-year-old boy Joel is called back to an old house – where his dying, bedridden father throws red tennis balls down the stairs to attract attention – and becomes involved with his cousin, Randolph, a wasted aesthete of no fixed accent and fathomless disappointments. It is ...”