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“... magazine, and she stayed there for most of the Twenties, having met her legendary lover Thelma Wood, a silverpoint artist from St Louis. Barnes called Nightwood, her most famous book, ‘my life with Thelma’. As seen by their contemporaries, it was a life that involved swanning around cafés dressed in black, Djuna with a sweeping cloak and a walking ...”

“... a deer for its speckled skin, and leapt on the back of a mountain bear and rode him out of the wood, all in imitation of the god Dionysus. Who stood, watching Ampelos. Then drew him close, with a warning, saying the boy need not fear the sharp mouths of panthers, lions or bears, only dread the horns of beasts – for he had seen a horned dragon rise from ...”

“... whispering with shockhow grey her hair is now, how skinny he has got.My sister thinks that portly robin on the lawnis Dad come back to say hello, and he takes a little hopout of sunlight into shade before alighting onthe compost bag and lengthily explaining everythingthat we can see is his, his apple tree, his grass,that patch of rhubarb he’d been about to ...”

“... I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference. Teasing Thomas about his hesitations between poetry and prose becomes in retrospect a rather darker meditation on choice and its consequences for both ...”

“... answer, there would be much more to say – about the John Dankworth score, for example, and about Robin Maugham’s novel. But it does suggest – all right, offer hints and signals – that there is a gothic ground where too much, too little and too subtle happily go together. In fact, you couldn’t do this bit of Chelsea gothic – where the count is not ...”

“... At one point his passionate defence of his policies – imagine Tony Blair wiping the floor with Robin Cook on the subject of safety procedures – makes us feel not that he was right but that he was realistic, and if we don’t exactly feel sympathy for him we do feel there’s a dignity amid the smarm. Maybe it’s Polanski’s lack of interest in politics ...”

“... promotion and easy prejudices, but an American, the CIA chief played with impeccable, icy charm by Robin Wright, hair cut short and dyed black, but otherwise much in the style of her role in the American version of House of Cards. She and Bachmann have a remarkable exchange about their goals, about what all this secrecy and illegality and interference is ...”

“... to K, and when he expatiates, in front of his LAPD boss, on the thought of having a soul, she (Robin Wright, fierce and firm as usual) tells him he has managed well enough without one so far. She’s not really being philosophical, though, just reminding him that cruel jobs require cruel people. But then things happen, within him and in the plot. In the ...”

“... and sinking plane, the Amazons repel the Germans, although not before Diana’s loved aunt (Robin Wright), the militarist counterpart to her pacifist mother, has been killed. The date is early 1918, and Trevor’s goal is to end the war that was supposed to end all wars. He means something pragmatic, like saving a certain number of lives. Diana thinks ...”

“... results of butchery. Sanjuro is captured by one of the gangs because, now a sort of surly Robin Hood, he has liberated a kidnapped woman, the boss’s mistress, and returned her to her abject husband and pleading child. He had to slice up six gangster guards to do this, so his craftiness, it turns out, is certainly backed up by swordsmanship, and the ...”

“... of light. One might draw an analogy with change in the material of a simple hand-tool, when wood is replaced by a synthetic substance: it may do the job as well, but one misses the incidental sensual pleasures of a slightly idiosyncratic, slightly malleable material. This is not to argue any special case for the items that now trickle from the ...”

“... in English about Godard came from the Sixties – from Richard Roud, Manny Farber, Susan Sontag, Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat and others. This reflected Godard’s much greater cultural centrality during that period and also his apparently secure place within the festival and art film system. When Godard veered off-course with the Dziga Vertov group, he ...”

“... continued with impostors Val Kilmer, in Batman Forever (1995) and George Clooney in 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 ...”

“... as Robert Warshow once suggested in a famous essay, but he is an embodiment of rogue power, a Robin Hood without the sentimental interest in the poor. Actually, gangsters in movies are always giving things away to children and widows, as Jack Nicholson hands out groceries at the beginning of The Departed; but this is just one more expression of their ...”

“... come near the top of the national hierarchy of thieves. They’re up there with Raffles and Robin Hood. People who don’t own large estates and pheasants tend to like poachers, because like Raffles they’re artisans – you can’t smash and grab a forest – and like Robin Hood they sock it to the system. ‘The ...”