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“... Johnny to the church rather than the police, and a struggling artist (ludicrously overplayed by Robert Newton) drags Johnny back to his room in order to paint him, hoping to ratchet up a failing talent by catching the light in a dying man’s eyes. This is where things go half-baked. In Johnny’s delirium, pictured as a J. Arthur Rank version of ...”

“... The devil is in the detail, they say, and this is certainly the case with the films of Robert Bresson. And if the devil is there, God can’t be far away. Or can he? These are very curious details, bits of the real but not part of any attempt at realism, pieces of a puzzle that may not even exist. Feet, legs, hands, sand, straw, mud, laceless old shoes; dulled or hallucinating faces staring past the camera at some lost version of infinity; countless shots of the backs of persons walking away from us, or figures whose heads are out of the frame most of the time; sound effects that threaten to take over the whole movie; an old tweed suit that moves us far more than the fake blood on a man’s face; passing cars that are more interesting than a couple going through the motions of an embrace in the foreground; acting that is not so much unprofessional as non-existent, a mere reciting of lines from a too perfectly written book ...”

“... As he looks forward to his 70th birthday Sir Michael Howard can also look back over a distinguished career which began with Wellington, Christ Church and the Coldstream Guards. In 1943, as Lieutenant Howard, fresh from the University, he led his platoon in a dangerous uphill charge against a German position north of Salerno ...”

“... infringement of what he said were the rules, but he calms down after that. In the other film, Robert Shaw, as the gang leader, also executes someone, but he is clearly making a point, and doesn’t get the hectic pleasure out of his deed that Travolta manifestly does. Throughout the new film, various people insist that the incident has nothing to do with ...”

“... we know what sort of film this is, and we wait and see. It Follows, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, offers an extraordinary mixture of over and under-statement, with almost nothing in between. In the scene I have just described, and indeed throughout the movie, the soundtrack, composed by an outfit called Disasterpeace, crashes and thumps ...”

“... as quickly as I managed to get a foot inside the door, I was sent a copy of Byzantium endures – Michael Moorcock. That one, icons iconing, balalaikas balalaikaing, kept me up nights marking pages, memorising passages, and dreaming dreams of a vividness and thrust that I hadn’t experienced since I was in the Army. My well-intentioned friends in Poland ...”

“... Celebrities who dropped by included Ginger Rogers, Moss Hart, Lynn Fontanne, Jack Dempsey, Robert ‘Believe-it-or-not’ Ripley, Elsa Maxwell and Jack Benny. They were in court less because of Hauptmann than because of Lindbergh, the biggest celebrity of them all. It is a sign of the passing of time that on the dustjacket of this book the name of ...”

“... Dia now also oversees the mother of all earthworks, Spiral Jetty, a great coil of rocks built by Robert Smithson into the Great Salt Lake in Utah in 1970.Initially directed by Heiner Friedrich, a German dealer who had exhibited such artists in Cologne and in New York, Dia was funded by his wife, Philippa de Menil, daughter of Dominique de Menil, a major ...”

“... Robert Altman’s Short Cuts is a long, loose-looking movie, but the looseness is an effect, carefully worked for. Plenty of themes recur throughout – insecurity, chance, rage, damage, the long, bruising war between men and women – and although there are fourteen or fifteen stories here (based on extrapolated from ten stories by Raymond Carver – the handouts and the introduction solemnly say nine stories and a poem, but the so-called poem is also a prose narrative), they are intricately stitched together, like a miniaturised Comédie humaine set in Los Angeles ...”

“... directly and by anagram to the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, who recently sued Brown’s publisher for plagiarism and lost. The third author, Henry Lincoln, didn’t sue. The book itself is mentioned in large capitals, and Teabing comments on it pedantically (‘their fundamental premise is sound’). Of ...”

“... abnegation is too much to expect of any director with two expensive stars on his hands. Remember Michael Mann’s thriller Heat, where Robert de Niro and Al Pacino get together for a totally inconsequential conversation just so we can see them together before they return to their posts on opposite sides of the law. The ...”

“... struck between the Labour front bench and the then Viscount Cranborne, now Marquess of Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, allowed 92 of the 759 ‘hereditaries’ to remain, on the understanding that they wouldn’t thwart the passage of legislation by their confrères. This arrangement, it was agreed, would remain until ‘stage two’ of the reforms. The ...”

“... sit upon each other gracelessly, heavy with dull and often clumsily conveyed management detail. Michael Swann is a ‘man with a highly distinguished scientific background, a very sharp brain and clouds of pipe smoke’. Douglas Muggeridge goes off with Milne to the West Indies two pages after he has died ‘tragically’ of a brain tumour. Strange that a ...”

“... appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some ...”

“... facts that the narrator knows, or wants to know, about his parents and grandparents. In June 1914 Michael and Una O’Shaughnessy have a reason for their stay in Cornwall: to conceal the date of birth of their child, conceived out of wedlock. This child is Rene, who grows up in Dublin, Bray and Sandymount in the 1920s. In 1934 she is an actress in a touring ...”