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“... settlement’ – a product of the tripartism of the war years, epitomised by the 1944 White Paper on Employment Policy – heavily influenced developments for a decade or so, but then began to break down; and that the course of events was bedevilled, but not fundamentally altered, by Britain’s insistence on trying to play a role it could no ...”

“... a sweet, pretty girl who works as a receptionist in her father’s realty office; she goes into Michael Anton’s grocery store in the East Baltimore Polish district because she’s cut her head jumping off a moving streetcar in her haste to follow the parade of boys hurrying to enlist after Pearl Harbor. Under pressure from Pauline and from a euphoric ...”

“... give a fascinating picture of Poland – no, they are Poland, as Juan Rulfo is Mexico, or Patrick White Australia. Further, they contain some of the funniest, most outrageous, acid and lugubrious writing I have ever read. I don’t think I have ever been spoken to by an author the way I have by Konwicki. The first of these four books is The Polish Complex ...”

“... I retreated to my thoughts.I felt sure that I had made Vikram Seth appear by thinking about him. Michael Holme, the narrator of An Equal Music, makes the love of his life appear by thinking about her. He’s sitting on a bus in Oxford Street when another bus draws alongside, and there she is: Julia McNicholl, or Julia Hansen as she now is, though ...”

“... Michael Kelly has produced a vivid, responsible account of his own itinerary, as a contributor to New Republic, the Boston Globe and the New York Times, through the Gulf War: from Baghdad to Amman; on to Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Saudi Arabia; into Kuwait and back into Iraq, via Basra; thence to Kurdistan. There are few sops to terrible beauty, whatever Kelly’s dust-jacket champions may say, and no excessive enthusiasm for the darker side of his material, either in the abandoned Iraqi torture chambers of Kuwait City or on the road to Basra ...”

“... began to be seen as a ‘problem’. Enoch Powell prophesied ‘rivers of blood’ and white working-class fascists shaved their heads. A series of Immigration Acts was passed, dividing families, stemming the flow. Most of the migrant workers had originally meant to stay a few years; go back with some money. But it didn’t often work out that ...”

“... them either, and yet they are right in thinking that childhood reminiscences make seductive books. Michael Schmidt was brought up in Mexico, and in his ‘not strictly autobiographical novel’, The Colonist, he turns with brilliant and painful concentration to his early years. No doubt he was in search of himself, and the making of what he now is – a ...”

“... Country. He said that he’d bought the farm mainly because he wanted to build it up for his son, Michael, who worked alongside him. But a month ago he’d driven into Ixopo to get some provisions when the farm radio in his bakkie sounded an alarm ‘for Mr Arthur or Michael Mitchell’. Either Mitchell Sr or Mitchell Jr ...”

“... she is clearly holding the gun. But then when he faces us, there is no sign of any wound: his white waistcoat is as immaculate as ever. He is dying of an allusion to shooting. Similarly when Jack the Ripper kills Lulu – he seemed at one point to have renounced his trade for the evening, since he threw away his own weapon – we see him pick up a kitchen ...”

“... movie, shot by Woody Bredell, is a noir classic, full of haunting, half-seen frames in black and white, shadows disappearing into shadows; and there is a burial in the rain that looks like a photographic allusion to a famous Courbet painting, except that here the tableau is dominated by a row of umbrellas. When we first meet Ava Gardner (five years before ...”

“... ideas, both visual and narrative. A grand shoot-out in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, with its white winding galleries circling an empty centre, is the sort of thing that would occur to any director. Only a director who had run out of other possibilities would hang on to the idea for more than a minute, though, and Tykwer hangs on to it for ever. After ...”

“... they weren’t watching. Written, directed and photographed by Cuarón, the film is in black and white, and opens with an image of what seems be a tiled wall. Credits are palely projected on it, but it’s hard to pay attention to them because the tiles are so interesting. It isn’t a wall, it turns out, it’s a floor, and the camera is looking down at ...”

“... but helpless against them. Even when reduced to the size of a postage stamp, or to black and white, there is no mistaking the pull and the skill and the force of his ...”

“... sixty. A few passers-by watch the arrival of the celebrities, of which there seem to be only two, Michael Yorke and Michael Caine (who later slags off the film). The audience is not star-studded either and heavily sprinkled with those freaks, autograph-hunters and emotional cripples who haunt the stage-doors of American ...”

“... runs off, leaving behind almost a million pounds in cash and some large bags of unidentified white powder (‘Why don’t you taste it like in the movies?’ ‘Because I still wouldn’t know what it was’), it comes as no great surprise that they decide to keep the lot. Equally unsurprising are their subsequent fallings-out, fears of being caught and ...”