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“... Thus the blandly, uncritically admiring school of Churchillians, of whom his official biographer, Martin Gilbert, is the leader, could never have turned back the natural tide of scholarly scepticism which laps around the feet – especially the feet – of all deceased political leaders in the generation after their death. In Churchill’s case, several toes ...”

“... advisers. She also commented on the importance of such Minimalist artists as Donald Judd and Agnes Martin as influences on Herzog and de Meuron, citing their clearly neo-Minimalist building for the Goetz collection of arte povera and abstract monochromes.Donald Judd was also put forward as a model by Nicholas Serota in his Walter Neurath Memorial ...”

“... My favourite moment in Martin Gilbert’s Life of Churchill is when the Prime Minister is touring the ruins of Hitler’s Chancellery in 1945: In the square in front of the building a crowd of Germans had gathered. Except for one old man who ‘shook his head disapprovingly’, Churchill later recalled, ‘they all began to cheer ...”

“... that raises intriguing questions about how the Northern Ireland peace process got underway.* ‘Martin McGuinness,’ Powell writes, ‘still denies sending the message stating that “our war is over” which started the correspondence with John Major, and it is pretty clear in retrospect that one of the intermediaries in the chain between the government ...”

“... best thing to do is to plunge into the middle or just beyond and then work back and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle of ...”

“... Nothing in Martin Scorsese’s film is quite as good as its first 15 minutes, but those 15 minutes are astonishing. You feel the movies are being invented; or at the very least that Scorsese has rediscovered a medium that has been lost since The Magnificent Ambersons. The camera pries and pulls back, sweeps and turns, picks up faces and gestures and furniture, putting itself (and us) in impossible situations ...”

“... sense of the world as a closed circle of violence and power. A young woman and a boy, Julie and Peter, attacked by mysterious assailants, have to run for their lives: a classic noir plot (a lover of jazz, Manchette likes to riff on the standards). He switches pace between scenes, speeding up the action until it’s a surreal blur or suspending it, leaving ...”

“... that it would not otherwise espouse. Here is the unreconstructed ‘engine of comedy’, Rex Martin (‘the famous farting novelist’) and his diminutive son, Felix. Here is ‘Jillian Burnes’, a transsexual romancer. But these knockabout cartoons are absorbed into a chiaroscuro of the forgotten, denizens of the deep recalled and re-remembered. The ...”

“... is dark and slippery and began by turning the former hero, Jim Phelps, long and suavely played by Peter Graves, into a faintly smiling villain played by Jon Voight. This did not go down well with everyone. Martin Landau, who was the master of disguise in the television series, said the original show ‘was a mind game. The ...”

“... their limits are most obviously, uncomfortably exposed. It’s a familiar observation, repeated by Martin Amis in a recent review of Iris: where literature addresses the internal, cinema must always deal in the external. So, ‘romance’ in Iris is all jumpers and bicycles and giddy concupiscence; ‘cleverness’ is a scattering of easily digested aphorisms ...”

“... the Prince of Wales’s entry into various debates on building and buildings. For example, Martin Pawley in the Guardian complains that the V & A exhibition put on to coincide with the publication of A Vision of Britain would not have been allowed by any other profession. Where, he asks, does one find public displays of botched medical operations? If ...”

“... conjure up voices which had been silent for two centuries, to resurrect what he calls (modifying Peter Laslett’s famous phrase) ‘a world that we had lost’. And how? Not by ‘contemplating philosophical treatises’, but by ‘grubbing in archives’: in particular, the rich store of papers from a Swiss publishing house, the Société Typographique de ...”

“... book about the ‘Catholic sensibility’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blake Morrison’s The Movement, Martin Amis’s Success, Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel, Graham Greene’s Ways of Escape, Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons, the Oxford American Dictionary, two books – by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on ...”

“... two.In Knowledge Lost, published in German in 2012 and now translated into English, the historian Martin Mulsow argues for fresh consideration of members of the European Wissensprekariat, or ‘intellectual precariat’. The expansion of German universities during the early modern period created a surfeit of graduates, many of whom were unable to find ...”

“... heavy in portents, swirling curtains, flickering candles, bumps in the dark, and the ghost of Peter Quint in particular looks as if he has come from a bad night at a rock concert. Still, Psycho was only a year old, and it must have been reasonable to think the audiences even for a classy film needed plenty of signals (shrieking music, for example) to show ...”