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“... close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as I’ve ever come across in the movies. But no one has ever been as repeatedly and consistently sinister, morally ...”

“... only one or two bees per bonnet. The Pevsnerian approach was different.In a witty essay, Michael Taylor, who drove Pevsner round Warwickshire, recalls the experience as stimulating and slightly nightmarish, ‘like viewing a video of a thousand years … of history … fast-forwarded’. Pevsner ‘robbed the word “specialist” of its meaning by ...”

“... of two steel blocks each by Richard Serra (for obvious reasons neither will be moved anytime soon).Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, calls the new design ‘smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless’. I would take ‘slightly soulless’ over ‘aggressively spectacular’, and given the political controversies visited on ...”

“... time the director was less convinced that Brando should be the lead. He considered a young Paul Newman and even Frank Sinatra. Did he reckon Marlon had a soft look, or too much beauty, for Terry Malloy, the failed boxer? Or had he heard that Marlon had been bad-mouthing him because Kazan (after tortured reflection) had in 1952 testified to the House ...”

“... Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and in England – and in a different, English way – Michael Caine, seldom did anything else. It was also a manner which could not always be easily distinguished from simple idleness. For the first 25 years of Mitchum’s career, his performances were routinely mocked – most consistently by Mitchum himself ...”

“... issue before our minds, in Peter de Bolla’s book Art Matters.2 De Bolla is looking at a Barnett Newman painting (Vir Heroicus Sublimis) in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has decided that the usual critical questions – what does this painting mean, what is it trying to say – are the wrong ones. He offers one or two not all that appealing ...”

“... Ricks reviewed Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot in the LRB (1 November 1984; the same year Michael Hastings’s play about Eliot’s first marriage was staged), he remarked: ‘Plainly it is the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the second volume of Robert Crawford’s sensitive biography, it’s the Tom and Em ...”