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“... precise, wry, lucid, analytic, subtly lyrical. What is delicately mocked, in this impeccably straight-faced prose, is writing itself: the ambitions and stiffness and poverty of writing, in the face of the multiple, shifting, unwritten world. Of course you have to write very well to be in a position to mock. We can all fail to say what we mean, any ...”

“... else. A stage direction in Fargo reads: ‘The police car enters with a whoosh and hums down a straight-ruled empty highway, cutting a landscape of flat and perfect white.’ The other remarkable performance in this movie, apart from McDormand’s, is that of William H. Macy as Jerry Lundergaard, a car salesman who owes a lot of money (he’s borrowed ...”

“... set in a preternaturally dark and teeming Brazil (a might-as-well-be Florida). Although, if it’s straight Florida you want, you’d probably still be better advised to read Carl Hiaasen or Joan Didion. Or Matthiessen or Conroy or Stevens. Or Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings or Zora Neale Hurston. Or the Master himself. The pieces (one doesn’t want to use the word ...”

“... day,’ we read. Here is ‘mute, dark, hungry Moscow’. Here are birch trees that stand ‘straight as martyrs’; clouds that race ‘like halfwits’; ‘taffeta darkness’; rainwater ‘tinged with cinnabar’. The point is not so much the originality of these evocations as their specificity, their representation of a will to defeat ...”

“... Yes, but it’s hard work. Conversely, do we have to believe that every form of strangeness leads straight into a horror movie, with no return? This is to bring cause and effect back with a vengeance, and to slot these wandering people back into an unequivocal story, almost certainly the wrong one. Finley asks a remarkable question about Jessie: ‘Had she ...”

“... of the soldier-macaque, whereas Attila fuels an industry of popular histories and fantasy novels, straight-to-video films and documentaries, all the while dispensing business secrets to would-be world conquerors in middle management. Mutatis mutandis, it has always been thus: Attila the exemplary demon, driven by imagined saints from the walls of cities that ...”

“... then a man in a domino emerged from an alley, caught his cloak about him with both hands, and made straight across the square. Andreas took a step forward and bowed. The domino raised his hat, and with it the half-mask fixed to the inside. There was a trustworthy look about the man; to judge from his bearing and manners, he belonged to the best ...”

“... was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in 2023, of cardiac arrest caused by complications from weight-loss surgery, she had been recording tapes of material for a memoir. These recordings form the basis of From ...”

“... in Ireland now.’ August Wennerstrom, a Swedish pastor travelling with some of his flock, went straight to the third-class smoking-room. ‘We tried to get something to drink,’ he reported afterwards, ‘but the bar was closed. Nothing else to do, we got someone to play the piano and danced.’ There were 2227 people aboard the Titanic: 1522 lost their ...”

“... of Arabic,’ Ahmad says to the owner, grinning conspiratorially at us. ‘Speak Arabic with Pak Michael, go on! He speaks Arabic. Go on! With a beard like that in Yemen you’d perfume it; here you mothball it to get rid of the cockroaches!’ So much for the sacred beard, a sign of piety with the Prophet’s beard the exemplar. It is distinctively Arab ...”

“... than Harold Bloom? Well, if you take her word for it, it’s Camille Paglia, come to set the world straight on the burning issues of our time: tenured radicals, date rape, the aesthetic evolution of Madonna. The self-styled genius and warrior woman seized public attention with her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson ...”

“... indifferent as an artist to its human consequences. This frigidity is elaborated in works of straight SF like The Drowned World and The Terminal Beach, in Post-Modernist ‘condensed’ novels like those collected in The Atrocity Exhibition, and in New Wave ‘speculative fiction’, such as Crash (Ballard’s previous best work, in my view). For Empire ...”

“... and parterres and side-boxes, the cost of nails and packthread, the greenroom gossip? I concede straight away that if you are mounting a performance, as they say, ‘in period’, then you need the basic historical dimensions and data, just as when you are playing ‘authentic’ baroque music you have to tune your strings to the right pitch. And if you are ...”

“... worldly-wise readers, ‘getting your way can require a degree of intrigue and manoeuvring.’ The straight-dealing Tony Blair would, they say, prefer that this was unnecessary and does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for ...”

“... died, and a fifth is missing. At the start, her daughter has received what may well be the missing Michael’s clothes, washed up from the sea ‘in the far north’ at Donegal. During the course of the play, Maurya tries to persuade her remaining son, Bartley, not to ride off with the horses to the Galway fair, predicting that he, too, will be taken by the ...”