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“... A middle-aged man​ looks insistently at a young woman. He doesn’t speak. He is smiling slightly, playing with her, but also seeking to trouble her. After a moment she says: ‘If you want to have a staring contest with me, you will lose.’ After a much longer moment he laughs. Has he found his match? Does she understand him, or does she just know how to play this particular game? The film in which this scene occurs, and in which a whole series of versions of it are offered to us, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and viewers and deemed an annoying waste of time by others ...”

“... tucked away in a narrow corner of time and space and class. One statue looks ‘comically’ young, ‘like a Mabel Lucie Attwell baby’. Another appears ‘beefy’, and on still another ‘the straight sag of the jowl gives a Mussolini effect.’ Many of them have slit eyes because round eyes ‘would give the coy surprise of George Robey’. The ...”

“... as humdrum history, the second time as printed farce. Canet meanwhile is having an affair with a young Vertheuil employee (Christa Théret) who wants to digitise everything. The places in the film are as restricted and repetitive as the persons. After the office and restaurant, we get living rooms where people eat and drink and quarrel, bedrooms where they ...”

“... offered excuses to minor users.’ Ah yes, the war on drugs serves a noble cause, protecting the young. In the film, Anslinger says less obliquely that drugs and Black people are ‘a contamination to our civilisation’, and that ‘this jazz music is the devil’s work.’ He immediately gets more funding for the Bureau. This thread in the film is based ...”

“... but we see the film as if it were already made. It’s about two people who had an affair when young and meet up again in order to fail to beget a sequel. In a very elegant invention, when Chris is lingering in what used to be Bergman’s house, she meets the actor we have seen playing the man in the as yet unmade movie. He’s just a tourist at this ...”

“... a photograph shows Catilina in bed with an underage pop star – who turns out not to be so young after all. This material not only provides a background for the enmity between the architect-inventor and the mayor, it conjures up a world where errors and falsehood can be recognised, and where the mildly monstrous, always operatic Catilina may after all ...”

“... knot of Roman soldiers huddled together over the saddest kind of duty. A comrade-in-arms had died young, after just two years under the standards. They buried him with the honours he deserved, in his best uniform and his shining metal belt – the cingulum that was every fighting man’s pride, the sign that he was a soldier. No headstone would mark his grave ...”

“... kept him alive: the infinite fascination and torment of his inner life. When Karen Obholzer, a young Austrian journalist with a special sensitivity to old men’s stories, tracked him down in his Vienna apartment, he was a debonair and melancholy old gentleman in his eighties with a slight, drooping resemblance to Harold Macmillan. Since 1919, he had lived ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... is covered by Three Continents. We begin in America with a pair of zealous twins, Harriet and Michael Wishwell (pronounced Witchell), 19 years old, both owning and expecting a lot of inherited assets, money and property, and both avid to serve some striking cause. ‘Michael, my twin brother, and I always wanted ...”

“... Readers making their way through Michael Bracewell’s latest novel may gradually become aware of a small but persistent ache: it comes of the author nudging them in the ribs. There is no chance of being caught napping during the various crises and cruces of The Conclave because Bracewell signposts them all with a diligence and clarity that would not disgrace a sightseeing guide ...”

“... limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The Easter Parade ...”

“... In the National Theatre’s inaugural season in 1963 Michael Redgrave played Claudius to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet. Apart from Olivier, the theatre’s first director, Redgrave, then aged 55, was its greatest star. Known to the public from his many film roles, and having just been named actor of the year by the Evening Standard for his Uncle Vanya at Chichester, which one critic called ‘the highest level of acting the contemporary theatre has to offer’, he was good box-office ...”

“... to this logic, Dostoevsky’s actual punishment, in 1849, for his membership of a group of young socialists – along with his fellows he was subjected to a mock execution, led out as if to be shot, but then sent to Siberia – should have relieved the epilepsy, since its punishing role would have been superseded by the sentence of the Tsar, a second ...”

“... grip the arm of his chair, the duty of the male was to provide. For Elizabeth Baker, an incisive young woman who had trained as a teacher, the male’s job was to ‘make something’ of himself. The domestic inappropriateness of this view was quickly overshadowed by the economic hopelessness in which she and her brood were suddenly engulfed. A diabetic ...”