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“... Michael Burn assumes in this book that the name of Richard Hillary means nothing to present-day readers, so the reviewer had better follow his practice and provide biographical details. Although he was born in Australia shortly after the end of the First World War, Hillary came to England at an early age and had a thoroughly English upper middle-class education – prep school, followed by public school (Shrewsbury) and Oxford (Trinity College ...”

“... to Mary and Richard (1988), a collection of love letters between Hillary and Mary Booker edited by Michael Burn, later to become Mary’s husband; this leads him to Burn’s own important POW novel, Yes, Farewell (1946) and Burn’s introduction to its reprint in 1974, as Farewell to ...”

“... for each other though. Guys catch the eyes of the girls (their friend’s girl) In glances that burn as the rounds arrive and the anecdotes flow Interrupting, interpolating, exaggerating, playing for laughs. But serious too. The young men are writers. Correction! They ‘write a bit’. Hence their loudly-voiced outrage, bewilderment, pain and disgust. The ...”

“... which forms the title of a very good book on Bulgakov by Julie Curtis: ‘Manuscripts don’t burn.’ He indicates a chair where the complete manuscript sits. Is he talking about ‘the immortality of a created work’, as Ellendea Proffer says in her commentary to the Picador translation? Expressing ‘an absolute trust in the triumph of ...”

“... Catching news about the Michael Jackson trial, I can’t help being reminded of a caustic song by Dan Bern, a singer less famous than Jackson by several orders of magnitude, called ‘Too Late to Die Young’. ‘The day that Elvis died was like a mercy killing,’ it begins, before turning its attention to the inglorious late careers of other fallen idols of American popular culture, challenging listeners to ‘name the last good film that Marlon Brando made/While trying to keep his kid from going to jail ...”

“... the humans,​ ’ a dark deep voice asks at the beginning of the film, ‘what can they do but burn?’ The answer is quite a lot, especially when they are defended by superheroes. Still, many of them do burn, and the film itself, The Avengers (2012), directed by Joss Whedon, quietly raises the issue of collateral ...”

“... films. One is shared with many action movies: there has to be a lot of damage to property. Cars burn, streets are ripped up, tall buildings flame and topple. This is great fun, like smashing all your toys so you can get another set, and it allows you to make terrific noises on the soundtrack. The other rule is that there has to be a good deal of ...”

“... correspondence. I don’t know what I see in you. You criticise my passionate letters, then burn them for safety. In return, you write me Latin tags, stoical philosophy boiled dry. I placed a knife under my white left breast (which you’ve never seen), broke the skin and sent you my heart’s blood on a handkerchief. You always feel sorry for your ...”

“... work to be had.This is what happened in Tigray and Wollo. The result, filmed by Mohammed Amin for Michael Buerk’s BBC report in October 1984, shocked the world. Six weeks later, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee summoned the directors of Oxfam and Save the Children to a hearing. Why, the committee chairman, Anthony Kershaw, wanted to know, had the ...”

“... in Love Again’: ‘Men flutter to me like moths around a flame/And if their wings burn, I know I’m not to blame.’ In the original German version she doesn’t say anything about falling in love again, or even for a first time. She says she’s made of love from head to toe, meaning some combination of sex and lethal magic. When she first ...”

“... he can be killed are equally mistaken. Weapons cannot pierce this life that animates you, nor fire burn it, nor water dampen it, nor wind dry it out. Have no fear, and stand up, for I love you. Then the two armies tear each other limb from limb. War as metaphor, war as brutal reality. Brook says his engagement with The Mahabharata began in 1966, when a young ...”

“... Calas. Corbin uses trial records and memoirs to capture the horror: To make sure the fire would burn well, the fuel, along with the body beneath it, was trampled underfoot. Chambort ‘packed the wood down with his foot’ and ‘danced precariously’ atop the pile ... Young Campot also danced about and raised his arms while shouting ‘Vive ...”

“... burns, making a joke about alcohol being the true spirit of foresight. Except that she doesn’t burn them. She burns other bits of paper – the questions have been kept below the stage and are transcribed so that she can read them later. There is also a flashback to a time when Zeena and her partner (Ian Keith; David Strathairn) were in vaudeville. Their ...”

“... and perfectly calm at the same time. She has the film’s one truly brilliant idea: she will burn down the cinema with the Nazis in it, using all the nitrate stock she has to create and fuel the blaze. She announces this scheme to her friend in the beautifully photographed empty lobby of her cinema. It’s as if she has to kill the movies to get rid of ...”

“... the dream dowager, twinkly and intelligent, that she must be (and is) up to something else. Burn Gorman brings a special gothic nastiness to his part as the evil pursuer of the missing marquess, and Fiona Shaw, as headmistress of the school Enola at first avoids and is later condemned to, is something like Mrs Dursley if she’d managed to get a job at ...”