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“... as a US citizen was specially arranged to suit his sense of its importance, presided over by Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s appointee as head of the Department of Homeland Security, and conducted on Jefferson’s birthday at the Jefferson Memorial. ‘There was a very stiff breeze blowing across the Tidal Basin,’ Hitchens recalls, ‘but it ...”

“... drink’; signing up for ‘car ride’ to visit the ‘ice cream’ shop; or signing off with ‘chase, tickle’ when playing with a pair of – ‘gorilla dolls’. Answering the question, after a local earthquake, ‘What happened?’, one gorilla ventures: ‘Darn darn floor bad bite. Trouble trouble.’ This is speaking, and sign languages are fully ...”

“... the Soviet Union as a foreigner and not become obsessed with spying. (If anyone doubts this, read Michael Frayn’s wonderful novel The Russian Interpreter, published the year I first went to Moscow.) ‘Do you think X is a spy?’ we were always asking each other about new Russian acquaintances, and sometimes about each other. It was a question that went the ...”

“... at the right time.) Or, as Steegmuller alone does, in his unannotated version, you can cut to the chase and write: ‘The verger was just then standing in the left doorway, under the figure of the dancing Salome.’ This is instantly comprehensible, and has the additional virtue of pointing up this image of lasciviousness beneath which Léon passes on his way ...”

“... political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of the play. There is an appealing American proverb, ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ It seems to throw light on the difficult case of Dryden. During ...”

“... aliens is no longer confined to a costly cat and mouse game along the frontier. It is a grim paper-chase that takes place in traffic queues and metered parking zones in Phoenix, the kitchens of fast-food restaurants, mechanics’ workshops and building sites miles from the fence. Oscar, a fluent English speaker in his thirties, was not the symbolic serial ...”

“... of female sexual perversion is the overlay on a savage critique of normal male sexuality. In Michael Haneke’s film of the novel a cool symmetry prevails: no sides are taken. But the book leaves us in no doubt that what Klemmer does to Erika is of a different order of harm from what she does to him. Erika’s weapon is ‘not doing’, keeping the sex ...”

“... filming in Ilkley. Nothing untoward occurred until the evening, when I was taken out to supper by Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. Came my salad of mixed leaves and there, nestling among the rocket, were several shards of broken glass. ‘Very mixed,’ said Miss Smith. ‘No,’ said the waiter. ‘It’s a mistake.’ I reached the 1990s without ...”

“... in the air, the latest Bond epic, The World Is Not Enough, would include a ‘high-speed boat chase’ along the Thames to the Dome. ‘Gorgeous Maria Grazia Cucinotta’ (a.k.a. Cigar Girl) would feature in a product placement orgy, pursued by every means of transport (including the air-balloons that are already drifting across the skyline), to a ...”

“... outside his desires, his libido and his complexes’. His focus now was on a different kind of chase, featuring cops and outlaws, hunters and hunted, pushing the genre almost to the point of abstraction. Melville’s first gangster film was Le Doulos (1962), with Belmondo and Serge Reggiani, based on a polar by Pierre Lesou. It’s a tangled story of ...”

“... got in different ways. Usually, it arrived in my lap after falling through four feet of air. I’d chase coins from the flying givers all but into the Thames itself; a few coins bounced beside me and leapt through the bars of the railing, vanishing into the water. The trains might rattle in and out behind me for an hour without my gaining a penny. Then someone ...”

“... the family car, a four-door Adler saloon, whose wheel came loose one day, forcing Donald to give chase as it romped through a field. Elena sat in the front and always felt car-sick. The boys lolled in the back, their bare legs sticking to leather seats heated by the sun. It took about an hour to reach a mountain valley near Sinaia, where chestnut ...”

“... You’d never know from the outside that inside they’re auctioning off the fresh spoils of the chase. When I was there, at seven o’clock one March morning, a small area of a vast concrete-floored shed held rows of yellow boxes filled with fish packed on crushed ice: cod longer than my arm, skate like kites made of mangled flesh, the astonished eyes of ...”

“... There is no mercy for white Westerners who sided with the MPLA. In an encounter in London with Michael Wolfers, an elderly ex-Times journalist who covered Nigeria during the Biafran war and spent years in Luanda with the MPLA as a Marxist aide-de-camp, she sneers at his fatal offer of foie gras, scoffs at the fact that he was privately educated, and goes a ...”