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“... character does at the start of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, when he steps from his drawn universe straight into a studio of chairs and cameras and wires. And when we see Ann in close-up we realise that her white dress has been marked by long, stylised lines of blood, and that she is dying, as in a vampire movie. She will do the same thing again the following ...”

“... shifts usually aren’t flagged. She looks very young, then she is almost middle-aged; she has straight hair, then it is curly. She speaks modestly and penitently in public; and then in front of a different audience she is like a rock star, expertly performing her grief. She looks after the children; we see them growing up and then shrinking to a younger ...”

“... to Midge. She doesn’t answer. Then she does. She says, ‘Do 45.’ Augie doesn’t understand straight away but quickly catches up and riffles through the pages of a script. She is referring to the moment when her character dies. They are rehearsing. I think we have to wonder whether she isn’t wrong about the truths of pessimism. The other great moment ...”

“... first was defined by his personal beauty; he was the bobby-soxers’ dreamboat, a gay guy for the straight eye. Karl Malden declared that ‘he had the face of a saint,’ an especially poignant compliment when we consider that it was spoken by a man with the face of a heavy-drinking Cabbage Patch doll. Clift made relatively few films, but initially at least ...”

“... Michael Heseltine’s dark secret is that he isn’t such a clever politician after all. This absorbing book shows that he has important qualities for an MP and even a minister, but not quite enough of them. He has the ambition, and he certainly has the determination (one friend of his told me that the important thing to remember about Heseltine is that ‘he never, never, ever gives up ...”

“... Now I feel like someone who thinks there’s a shower on the way, and then it rains for ten days straight. Williams is just full of alphabets. The first story is even called ‘The Alphabet’, and near its end offers descriptions of all 26 letters: ‘P is cuckoo-spit on the length of a chive, cooling in the dew-dawn … Pentecostal or horrified upthrust ...”

“... wonders what sort of metaphor he has in mind, but the first says he just meant going on in a straight line. Due west, in this case. In the next frame they are looking at the sea. The brothers are Eli and Charlie, played by John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix. Reilly is also the producer of the work, having seen in DeWitt’s novel a starting point for the ...”

“... looked like a loser – there is no way of deciding whether Hoffman is a good man reaching for a straight truth beneath all the angles and bluffs and façades, the simple certainty that allows him to finesse everything else, or whether he is just laying out a thoroughgoing pragmatism, asserting that trust is a basic currency of the trade, part of the ...”

“... a Mabel Lucie Attwell baby’. Another appears ‘beefy’, and on still another ‘the straight sag of the jowl gives a Mussolini effect.’ Many of them have slit eyes because round eyes ‘would give the coy surprise of George Robey’. The cross-cultural juggling here is pretty amazing: ancient Eastern artists are said to be avoiding an effect a ...”

“... but the parents do shapeshift: at various points they are white-haired, dark-haired, crooked, straight-backed, about the same age as their son, twice his age, on their deathbeds or deep in dementia. Dad is the person who gives us the witticism about not remembering. Jake and Lucy don’t appear to notice any of these changes. It’s interesting to visit ...”

“... the immaculate physical setting – with its black or white gallery walls, some curved and some straight, small rooms, long passageways, snug little mezzanine at the end and introspective pebble beach from some Scandi-noir outside – and the derisory and unsightly paintings was troubling. One felt a little pampered and half-ashamed of the fact. Couldn’t ...”

“... think of Marty Feldman and Gene Hackman and to murmur ‘Walk this way.’ The acting-style of the straight – that is, human – characters in Frankenstein as in other Thirties films seems to belong to some cobwebbed theatrical museum, all twitches and signals and period exclamations. The same goes for large chunks of movie humour in those days: if you were ...”

“... hopeless and old-fashioned. Of course there was no point in writing anything that didn’t follow straight on from Ulysses and The Unnameable.’ ‘Oh sure,’ as an insufferable student puts it in What a Carve Up! (1994), ‘there are a few people who are still doing interesting things with the form – Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman crowd – but any ...”

“... were three other people in the dock, charged with conspiracy to cause explosions. One of them was Michael Murray, a workmate of two of the six, who made no secret of his membership of the IRA. In the best IRA tradition he chose not to participate in the proceedings. His presence in the dock alongside the six was deeply damaging to their case. This is no doubt ...”

“... it’s always the right time: a mysterious, magical seven. If time doesn’t necessarily move in straight lines, neither do Smith’s narratives. She has given The Accidental three sections of equal length, labelled ‘The Beginning’, ‘The Middle’ and ‘The End’. The first opens with 12-year-old Astrid’s meditation on beginnings. The heading is ...”