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“... But the mistake lay in the expectation.Douglas hired Kubrick again three years later to replace Anthony Mann as the director of Spartacus. This was a risky opportunity; but in 1960 success with a Roman epic could be trusted to make a director’s commercial reputation. An iron law of the genre was that Jesus must be in the movie somewhere. Spartacus dodged ...”

“... You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that,’ says Hamm to Clov in Endgame. This is sometimes taken as a summary of what is alleged to be the distinctively bleak Beckettian world-view, but for it even to be a starter in this role, one would have to figure out what it means. For, as the philosopher Stanley Cavell observed, the meaning(s) will vary according to the stress-pattern the actor’s voice imposes on its principal terms; if, for example, on ‘cure’, this of itself would not preclude other worthwhile possibilities for our terrestial condition, and if on ‘that’, there could be an implicit invitation to countenance other-worldly aspirations ...”

“... as it wants it to be, making the whole play some sort of expiation. I often read and reread Anthony Powell’s Journals where a recurring theme is the stupidity and bad behaviour of journalists by whose crassness Powell was always unsurprised. So no change there. 26 May. Do a question and answer session at Warwick Arts Centre. The talk is preceded by a ...”

“... Hobsbawm in its own records, which were housed in the Registry, described by the MI5 veteran Peter Wright as ‘a mass of dry paper’ inside which ‘were warm trails waiting to be followed’. This repository, containing an estimated 500,000 files by the mid-1950s, was organised according to an elaborate system of cross-referencing between Personal ...”