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“... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...”

“... that was so tight it gave her a headache. Difficulties with clothes occur in many of her books. Peter Rabbit’s expression of resigned discomfort as his mother buttons his coat up too tightly under his chin, Tom Kitten’s wide-eyed dismay as the buttons fly off his Sunday suit, and numerous accidents to pinafores are among the details that give the tales ...”

“... shell that served as his hermitage, but encased in his glass sphere by the Iminac Company of Lake Jackson, Texas, he’d been preserved against decay. In effect, he had become – simultaneously – mummy, exhibit and bibelot, a quintessentially kitsch object which entranced its discoverer, fond admirer and future theorist. Rodney provoked in her ...”

“... photograph on the jacket gives the story a sharper edge: Halle bears some resemblance to Peter Sellers in one of his manic roles. That Pei, architect of the Louvre Pyramid, thought Halle’s study out of order is not surprising, but he was mistaken if he thought it crudely reductionist. As a prelude to his analysis Halle describes the kinds of house ...”

“... by Michael Fassbender, one as a stiff, friendly American guy and the other as the imitation of Peter O’Toole he had already perfected in Prometheus, adds to the riddle. And here, as in so many science-fiction movies, the decision to have the character of a robot acted rather than animated complicates the issue of what it means to be human to an extent ...”

“... diplomats who have long colonised this other new world from behind the scenes. In ‘Across the Lake’, we follow scared but fascinated Rob, for whom travel is a kind of moral mission of self-discovery: ‘There was something – well, something correct about being where he was.’ Rob takes one journey too far, to a village where civil war is waged each ...”

“... as an idyllic time, especially the days spent at his mother’s family estate on the banks of Lake Geneva. According to MacCabe, ‘the impression one gets is of a rather dreamy child, charming and spoiled, the apple of his mother’s eye, but from early on in considerable conflict with his father.’ 2. Cinephilia. At the end of the war, Godard was sent ...”

“... place in the tradition: she humanised the gentleman detective (Alleyn’s descent from Lord Peter is clear in the early Enter a murderer), she provided varied, and usually convincing, settings, and she let a consistent good humour (seldom a wit) play over her characters and events – a good humour that is more to many readers’ taste than the hectic ...”

“... was dismantled, and the spaces it had occupied were turned over to the people. The artificial lake of its landscape garden was drained and work started on the first stage of a monument to the new dynasty, the huge Flavian amphitheatre. The Colossus of Nero, a gigantic portrait statue which had stood 120 feet high in the palace’s vestibule, was cleansed ...”

“... to flood these meadows, producing what was at first an ample moat and latterly a grand ornamental lake, and the ruins in their centre are all that now remains of Kenilworth Castle. This was once the most important private residence in England, and the fireworks commemorated by this bench marked the completion of the final phase of its construction. Since ...”

“... fear of enormous injury. A peacetime fear. Sitting out nights in the frozen bass-woods below Elk Lake, listening for trolling motors easing down into the shallows of the Rapid River, sinking steelhead weirs between the first narrow sand shoals, he would suddenly sense something nearby, something that would hit him and blow him to pieces, and he’d pitch ...”

“... These days, it may well be a drystone wall winding between trees before burying its end in a lake, like the great Norse serpent for ever drinking the world’s waters dry. Or a cairn on a Highland headland with a fire flaming inside it. Or a longboat made of stakes and stones and turf, grounded in the undergrowth of a forest. These works often use ...”

“... off from Gérard Depardieu, or Georges, the insidious, attractive fortysomething we remember in Peter Weir’s Green Card (1990). The idea that Depardieu has gone or is going anywhere is endlessly tantalising: he has never been more insistent, more palpably at home or preposterous than he is now, as he promises the French he’ll be waddling off in ...”

“... Last week, in another part of the city, a human head turned up.’ The severed head which opens Peter Conrad’s first novel suggests that contemporary fiction might be defined by its increasing convergence with the weird tale, the story based on a deliberate disruption of the natural order. The head is anonymous, sealed in a plastic bag, and being used as a football by a group of boys ...”

“... was six but I thought I knew what she meant. I had these friends, the Routledge twins: Andrew and Peter. My own two Christian names, as it happened, but divided up like that I didn’t recognise them as mine. Andrew was quiet and cautious, Peter quick and reckless. They lived on a mucky farm nearby; you turned out of the ...”