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“... A man has been mistaken for somebody else. He has been kidnapped, forced to drink a bottle of bourbon and sent off to meet his death in a stolen car. He survives, and decides it is time to get things straight. He bribes his way into the hotel room of the man he is supposed to be. On the table he finds a photograph of the person who tried to kill him the night before ...”

“... What​ does it mean for a romance to take the shape of a murder investigation? In a Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray’s elegantly bitter film about damaged trust, throws that question at its viewers. If all love stories are inquiries of one kind or another, the movie seems to suggest, perhaps they differ only in their relative violence. When filming began, Ray was married to its female lead, Gloria Grahame; by the time it ended, they were living apart ...”

“... He was primarily​ an archivist, but an archivist of a world that didn’t exist. He was a compulsive collector, a browser, cross-indexer. When he died the basement where he worked was full of cardboard boxes marked with labels like ‘stamps’, ‘maps’, ‘Dürer’, ‘plastic shells’, ‘glasses’, ‘cording’. He left a diary, which he called a ‘repository laboratory, picture gallery, museum, sanctuary, observatory, key ...”

“... In the centre of the room there are two skeletons. Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, faces the front. His skeleton, tainted brown because of the speed and secrecy of its preparation, is seven feet ten inches tall. So towering are the bones, and so impossibly hefty is their accompanying leather boot, that it’s easy to walk past without noticing the adjacent filigree form ...”

“... that of the ‘Sicilian fairy’, Caroline Crachami, only one foot, ten and a half inches tall; Gaby Wood wrote about her in the LRB (11 December 1997) and about the morbid fascination with freakery. It’s unclear whether the two skeletons will return to display when the museum is reopened. Byrne had wanted his body buried at sea to avoid Hunter’s ...”

“... Western culture from its exile in the sub-Zeitgeist back into the mainstream’. The human side of Gaby Wood’s graceful account of puppets and toy stories is supplied by ‘Tiny’ Schneider, on whom Wood pays a visit in her Florida mobile home. Tiny is the last survivor of four siblings who never grew to much more ...”