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“... end, even if it is doing so amidst great suffering. But the writing in A Land Apart is largely by white writers and, especially that translated from Afrikaans, is almost entirely pervaded by a deep sense of dread. The preface speaks of this mood in Afrikaans fiction as ‘an intimation of apocalypse, which implies not just the death of the individual or the ...”

“... enterprise on the largest scale, put together by a committee chaired by William Feaver. Modernist white walls mask the emphatic textures and shapes of the interior of the shell, so that Fifties Brutalism encloses Thirties Modern. But what is displayed in the cases and on the walls is an attempt at total recall. A huge range of objects is thrown together ...”

“... What​ was it like growing up in black and white?’ was a question I asked my mother once. Until that moment her memories of childhood, so much more engrossing than any bedtime story, had unspooled in my head in perfect greyscale. (They do still, in childish defiance of the facts.) It wasn’t as if I’d seen many photographs of her as a girl – I still haven’t – but simply that the past, as I had perceived it, was defined by an absence of colour ...”

“... a sublime and desolate night or two away from it all. We come much closer to the hangings; the two white men among the condemned get to make speeches, while the Indian just has a black sack pulled unceremoniously over his face. And above all we have Jeff Bridges in place of John Wayne. The two men don’t look all that different: shabby and decaying and ...”

“... so obvious what the characters are thinking that they might as well be shouting. As in the Billy Joel song they are sharing a drink they call loneliness but it’s better than drinking alone. The first person we see in the film talks a bit but we learn far more from what we see of him and around him. He’s a drug dealer checking in with one of his boys on ...”

“... the most popular movie and, after the Bible, the best-selling book of all time, is a monument to white supremacy. The book and film offer different variations on the theme: the David O. Selznick production replaced Mitchell’s celebration of the Ku-Klux-Klan with a visually unforgettable paean to ‘the cavalier society’ of antebellum Atlanta, with its ...”

“... of wine!’ In one of his scrolls envisioning Hell where the divine allowed him to delve, in Joel, son of Pethuel, (he added, the pedant, 1.12!) he found a quotation that made his day and he tried to use to mar mine how pomegranates would wither away and shrivelled grapes hang from the vine. He tried to convince me but didn’t succeed as I spiked out ...”

“... million. The little boy in the film, Cole Sear (played with audience-beguiling depth by Haley Joel Osment), sees dead people who don’t know they’re dead, and when the film came out it was not merely a success on every front, but, like every success of that sort, caused people to see it as establishing a new genre, the emotional supernatural ...”

“... too, must surely be ‘by Preston Sturges’. Who else?Enter our hero, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), acclaimed director of hit comedies and musicals, who’s about to tell the studio bosses that he’s done with the motley mountebank malarkey. He wants instead to make a film of a grittily realist social protest novel titled O Brother, Where Art ...”

“... off, Sue Ellen’s name is not one to be taken lightly. In comparing her with a Mrs Hazel Pinder White, Jonathan Aitken brought on himself a legal action requiring him to kneel on the sand of Viking Bay, Broadstairs, and apologise publicly. JR’s wife, complained the plaintiff, ‘was nothing but a high-class prostitute who drank heavily and was a total ...”

“... of pain worse even than losing a child. ‘She’s my best girlfriend,’ Elvis sobbed on the white steps of Graceland when she was gone: ‘She’s all we lived for.’ Before she met Elvis’s father, she was Gladys Love Smith. Her mother was Octavia Luvenia Mansell, her great-grandmother was a Cherokee, Morning ...”

“... Batman and Robin (1997). I’m more than happy to forget the last two of those films, directed by Joel Schumacher, but the first two, both directed by Tim Burton, have much to recommend them – not least the presence of Jack Nicholson as the Joker, whose cheerful idea of havoc, very fine in its way, if essentially identical to what Nicholson is up to in most ...”

“... so he thinks. As he enters one elevator in order to descend to the lobby, Gutman’s accomplice, Joel Cairo, whom Spade already has grounds to distrust, exits from another. His failure to spot Cairo will very nearly prove fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice ...”

“... a glamorous Berlin studio portrait, her nudity is accentuated by the dangling necklace and white scarf that cover her trunk. Although these photographs all date from 1925, the year she became an international celebrity at the age of 19, they also chart the successive stages – blackface minstrelsy, African fantasy, cosmopolitan Modernism – that mark ...”

“... without, individually, ceasing to be delightful. Here, for example, is a part of his account of Joel Barlow, confined in the lazar-house at Marseille, and about to contemplate the origin of rivers and the meaning of pagan nature-cults: The cooks of the establishment kept a sturdy Provençal kitchen that made few concessions to the broiling August ...”