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“... George Michael​ died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016; despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison ...”

“... but all that seems to happen in this line is that the agent, Richard Strickland, played by Michael Shannon with fabulously nasty relish, tortures him with a cattle prod – and loses two fingers in the process. The creature is referred to as ‘the asset’, indeed ‘the most sensitive asset’ the facility has entertained, but this is wishful ...”

“... Since being acquitted of child molestation charges last summer, Michael Jackson has been hanging out in Bahrain, enjoying the hospitality of the ruler’s poptastic son Sheikh Abdullah. Jackson is said to have become a Muslim (which is sure to please his critics on Good Morning America), but evidence would suggest he has yet to get the hang of Islamic custom ...”

“... drone, five notes, as inhibited and pleonastic as the title. My father bought a gramophone, a black box, and played late Beethoven on it, which my mother was always to associate with her miscarriage of that year. I was forever carrying it up to my room, and quietly playing through my infant collection of singles, Led Zeppelin, The Tremoloes, My Sweet ...”

“... happiness but how often does it agree to sit on our chairs. Examine your fingertips! If they are black, it is already too late. End of August The white bellies of dead fish loom among duckweed and rushes. Crows have wings to enable them to escape death. There are times I know that God is most concerned with the fate of snails. He builds them houses. We are ...”

“... Peter Suschitzky – but this only makes it feel more like a movie. The voices are a clue as well. Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud speak with flawless English accents, as does Sarah Gadon as Emma, Jung’s all too perfect wife. Knightley speaks fluent American-Russian, and Vincent Cassel as the disreputable Otto Gross sounds as French ...”

“... with his father in Chagrin Falls, cigars, canes, plod shoes, a twin squeezed benignity in fat black double-breasted coats. He took up the hem of his father’s tombstone with his landless ...”

“... on the take are good for the economy and the social order. These people do not spend their ‘black’ money on wine, women and song. They do not roister and revel. They are solid members of society. The money goes for a new house in the suburbia where the kids can grow up untainted by crime-breeding slums. The money goes for college tuition that will ...”

“... as ‘Hollyweird’, so we should be prepared for a bit of shape-shifting.The warriors are four black American veterans returning to Vietnam for what looks like a trip down memory lane. It is some time after 2016. We know this because one of the men voted for Trump. He expresses the appropriate bitterness about immigrants, and wears a MAGA baseball cap. The ...”

“... no world, just the set or the simulation where the conversations take place. When directors like Michael Mann, whose movie version of Miami Vice has just opened, say they want to make episodes of television series as if they were movies, they mean, among other things, that they want to create a world, a location which is a kind of character. This is as true ...”

“... 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 on Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last ...”

“... Shaka King’s​ Judas and the Black Messiah (available on Amazon Prime) leaves us in no doubt as to who is the more interesting character. This preference is obscured (or perhaps highlighted) by the fact that the actors playing the two parts (LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya) have both been nominated as ‘best supporting actor’ at this year’s Oscars, as if there were no main role, or it might be dangerous to say which it is ...”

“... ally is Thaddeus Stevens, a witty and domineering abolitionist, represented by an extraordinary black wig that has Tommy Lee Jones underneath it. Jones gets craggier with every film he is in, his face, as Woody Allen might say, a combination of Gertrude Stein’s and some local mountain. He manages to be funny and bleak without any sense of contradiction ...”

“... namesake, could not ‘wash his hands of responsibility for this essentially vicious film’), and Michael Powell’s career went into a slump. You can see the film on a Criterion Collection DVD with an excellent commentary by Laura Mulvey, or you can walk out yourselves from the Curzon and other cinemas, where it is now showing in a restored print. Martin ...”

“... I was not myself. I was just anyone.’ The person who says ‘I’ in Michael Hofmann’s earlier poems is uncertain, diffident, angry; he seems both gnarled and youthful, like some hoary child out of Hardy, although rather better treated: Most evenings I was aphasic, incapable of speech, worn down by tolerance and inclusion ...”