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“... Children​ have some of the best lines in Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski and following not very hard on the heels of the original, which came out in 1986. When Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connolly) reintroduces her long-term, on-off love interest to her daughter as Captain Pete Mitchell, the girl says, ‘Captain? Still?’ She obviously knows a lot about time and the navy, and probably guesses a lot about Pete (Tom Cruise, of course ...”

“... I grow up, can I become a hangman?’The Scarlet Empress was the sixth film Dietrich made with Joseph von Sternberg. They made seven together between 1930 and 1935, the first in Germany, the others in the US. Sternberg said she attracted him with her ‘cold disdain’, her lack of interest in what she was supposed to be interested in. And it’s worth ...”

“... Dante was translated to a higher sphere and left our days of dung. It’s my opinion my friend Michael Hofmann is a wizard. Every page of German, Hofmann eats a gizzard, Translates the untranslatable Words, words, words. Worst when it’s poetry – But even Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch. Mandelstam could absolutely ...”

“... aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination. Michael Collie, the more severe of Borrow’s new biographers, notes the instructions Borrow’s publisher gave him when he was writing The Bible in Spain: he was told to report his remarkable achievements, experiences and skills ‘in a natural manner, as if ...”

“... he seemed to make his way into whatever I was doing, even the unlikeliest things. Into Kafka. Into Joseph Roth. He got into everything. Nothing seemed to be free of him, or to go without him. Perhaps it’s because of the contradictory or revisionist impulses you find in him everywhere, so he is all over many arguments. Into the past (the dinnseanchas poems of ...”

“... of rebellion is depicted in many novels and films, from Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin to Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose. Stauffenberg and the other conspirators of July 1944 understood that their plan to murder Hitler and stage a coup was unlikely to come off. Instead of success, there would be the recorded fact that they had tried. They played ...”

“... With Joseph Roth, you begin – and end – with the prose. The great delight of this Austrian novelist, who wrote in the Twenties and Thirties, lies in his strange, nimble, curling sentences, which are always skewing into the most unexpected metaphors. It is rare to find luminous powers of realism and narrative clarity so finely combined with a high poetic temperature ...”

“... when they are thought of at all. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was founded by Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York, in 1830, shortly after he published the Book of Mormon. The Book purported to be the history of a family of Jews who had sailed to the Americas around 600 BC. According to the Book, shortly after the Resurrection Christ appeared ...”

“... biography, based on archival research and extensive interviews, was that of the American Slavists, Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark, which for years circulated in a samizdat translation in the Soviet Union. Nor was this at all surprising: the resolutely non-Marxist Bakhtin (though he was obliged for professional reasons to grind out an occasional article on ...”

“... To mix a metaphor, the mind, to be the pièce de résistance, has to be off the beaten track. Joseph Brodsky claimed to think that 90 per cent of love poetry was postcoital; Williams’s stories, with only one or two exceptions, come in the wake of break-ups. The lover – the bird or bard – has flown. The reader may very well think this is no bad ...”

“... but they seem to have fallen into it as if by magic. There’s a considerable contrast here with Joseph Sargent’s earlier version (1974), where we see the men gather and can tell they’re heading for something ominous, if only because they’re all wearing the same sort of false moustache. They are called, we soon learn, Mr Blue, Mr Green, Mr Brown, Mr ...”

“... and wear their make-up well enough for the story to move along. They are, as the credits say, Joseph Tura and Maria Tura. But they carry these roles as forms of half-donned costume, and we keep seeing in them not the tale of Polish actors playing parts but the literal reality of American actors playing themselves. In this way Lubitsch designs their escape ...”

“... There is another question on which I am out of line, this time in disagreement with my old friend Michael Foot. Five 20th-century prime ministers and one non-premier (Joseph Chamberlain) have statues in the lobby of the House of Commons: Balfour, Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill and Attlee. The inclusion of ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... holes. So far, the novel’s most thoughtful reviewers – Cynthia Ozick in the New York Times and Michael Gorra in the New York Review of Books – have taken care to talk about both the story-strands and the anxieties about story in Middle C. But they have shied away from trying to answer their own big questions about the novel. Gorra summarises the plot ...”