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“... or even Vermeer-forging, sense. Some gentlemanly code of ethics enfolds the activities of Thomas Wise and his fellows. As for purely literary, as opposed to bibliographical forgery, it receives no censure at all. Indeed, it receives rather high esteem. James Crossley, the distinguished 19th-century antiquarian and bibliographer, plumed himself on having ...”

“... man in a position made impossible by historical developments, one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what ...”

“... fun and when is it an exploitation of vulnerable people? The dialogue in each case is full of wise-guy cynicism: ‘People are desperate to know who they are’; someone ‘wants to be found out, like everyone else’. But what more can be said? The story starts in a fairground and moves to a city, shifting from mind-reading to psychoanalysis. At the ...”

“... that does not so much challenge the arguments of the revisionists as ignore them altogether. The Wise Men is a graceful and intelligent portrait of the careers of six Americans who for more than twenty years were pillars of their country’s post-war foreign policy ‘establishment’: Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, John McCloy ...”

“... There is little in most of this to quarrel with. He is experienced, he is well-informed, he is wise. It is, however, reassuring to lesser mortals to observe that even such a great man as Lord Roll does not entirely lack an Achilles heel. Could there be a touch of vanity in his makeup? The photographs chosen to illustrate the book, for example, are ...”

“... a little harder to say why. The film is not as fast and zany as Bringing up Baby, and not as wise and worldly as His Girl Friday. Part of the answer to the question is, as Haskell says, the touch that McCarey brought from ‘silent film to the talky genre’, and the ‘blend of hilarity, nonsense and lyricism’ he had already created in Duck ...”

“... when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,/ Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews?’ In Pasolini we see more faces: all looking as Italian as Charlton Heston, say, playing Moses, looks American. But these are ancient faces, and if we haven’t looked at ...”

“... the movie allows us constantly to think of alternative attitudes and solutions, to indulge all our wise and gloomy thoughts about what our basic instincts usually look like, and resolutely goes its own way. This is one of the film’s challenges to us, but it is not where its energy lies. This is in its eager closeness to adventure games and puzzles. When ...”

“... of Hungarian nerve, social bluff and show-business instinct once commanded the British cinema. In Michael Korda’s telling, however, the panorama of picture-making is not always alight with understanding or information. The author may have been born on the night in 1933 when his uncle Alexander Korda’s first great success, The Private Life of Henry ...”

“... There was once a king who was troubled by all the misery he observed about him. So he summoned his wise men and commanded them to inquire into its causes. The wise men duly looked into the matter, and reported back to the king that the cause of all the misery was him. So runs Bertolt Brecht’s parable of the founding in 1923 of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, a centre for Marxist studies endowed by a wealthy German capitalist ...”

“... of unspeakable amatory and alcoholic excess. We never quite got the hang of each other, code-wise. I think he may have been disappointed at my failure to respond in kind with ‘Hey, ma MAN!’ or ‘You betchar-ASS!’, professional courtesies not often heard by the banks of the Trent. For my part, I had some difficulty in understanding his general ...”

“... A campaigning politician is wise to be ever-alive to the possibility of being set-up and made to look ridiculous. In the light of the Belgrano affair, I do not doubt that I have accumulated a large and distinguished number of enemies, who would be only too delighted to see me slip on the ice. If a campaigner is proved hideously wrong in one matter, those who wish to destroy his case can gleefully point to the possibility of error in a related matter ...”

“... 50p part-paid shares have risen to over 160p). But the head asks whether such a pledge is wise. Will the numerous shareholders of BT be pleased? What would be the effect on the PSBR? However all this may be, things have changed. Replacing Labour is no longer the name of the Alliance game (if indeed it ever was: some at least of the founders of the SDP ...”

“... but still damaging weakness. Mathilde, magnificently played by Simone Signoret in her best brisk, wise, broken-hearted manner, is a brilliant Resistance organiser who among other things orchestrates Gerbier’s extraordinary escape from what looked like certain death. But she has a flaw: not her love for her 17-year-old daughter, but her unwillingness to let ...”

“... comedies made at Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, as Stubbs reminds us, Michael Balcon, the studio’s head in its heyday, was explicit in defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the ...”