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“... little boy at the top of the castle. I hear your footsteps on the stairs. Why do you always run? A young gentleman should walk, not run.’    I was more interested in a brass knob on the bedstead, which wobbled as she spoke, than in what she was saying. She was an impoverished Miss Havisham who had lived in a different social world. There was no ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... save that his nose is a switchback and his lines blurred ... The usual self-consciousness of young men, especially as he threw in, gratuitously, the information that he descends from Dean, Rector, Bishop, Von Ranke etc etc, only in order to say that he despises them. I tried, perhaps, to curry favour, as my weakness is. L was adamant. Then we were ...”

“... to the full-page portrait of the photographer read ‘The Greatest War-Photographer in the World: Robert Capa’. Life also ran the story and described how Capa had crossed the river Segre with the troops the night before the action. During the next few years Capa filed pictures of war and its aftermath from China, Normandy, Sicily and Africa. His pictures of ...”

“... with its bitterness at Europe’s ‘botched civilisation’ and the slaughter of her young men may have helped fuel the MacLean who was increasingly enraged at the oppression of his own Gaelic people, and prepare him to become a modern poet of war and of the strains between action and aesthetics. Some of his short early lyrics such as ...”

“... in his 71st year. Born in Glasgow, he was taken to the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis as a very young child after his father, a merchant seaman, died of tuberculosis. Iain’s mother brought up her three sons in a Gaelic-speaking household and worked as a ‘herring girl’, gutting fish with her hacked, salt-smarting hands. Murdo Macdonald, who shared a ...”

“... not at all a sad but a buoyant, even joyful book. One can’t but see Riddley as a Mark Twainish young frontier hero, honest, determined and thoughtful (he specialises in riddles). Folk wisdom is being coined in ‘your tern now my tern later’ or ‘sum tyms bytin sum tyms bit,’ and experience is interpreted symbolically, as when the boar-killing on his ...”

“... with many of the old ingredients, expertly mixed: the overpowering grande dame, the breathless young idolator who suddenly loses his rose-coloured specs, the devoted (but is she?) dresser, the ambiguous secretary, and so on. And here too are Troy, being painterly, and Alleyn being the gentleman ’tec – still handsome enough to raise an appreciative ...”

“... Sixties, when he was teaching at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies and the young directors were his students. He conveys a liking for put-upon but dogged and resilient human beings. Kundera himself has an attractive presence in the book: reminding us of the nature of fantasy by taking responsibility for it, in his role as novelist: but ...”

“... shock them back in turn, as in this exchange in Tulsa in 2014: At last night’s book signing a young woman approached me, asking: ‘If you were a paedophile, and you knew you could be cured after having sex with a single baby, would you do it or would you continue on with a life of celibacy?’ It was a good question, but, for me, an easy one. ‘Sex ...”

“... woman, during which she invited him to burn her buttocks with a lit cigarette. This image, of the young Matthew’s hand pressing the object into the woman’s flesh, echoes the previous night’s violence and serves as a displaced expression of the toxic masculinity that has intimidated and motivated him throughout his life. Matthew means to fake his way ...”

“... occultism and witchcraft. He denounced the witches of Fez as lesbians who sought to ensnare young women. His attitudes towards the various groupings of Muslims were those of a member of the strict North African Maliki school of religious law and ritual. He sneered at the rival Hanafi school in Egypt, claiming that they had made a religion of eating ...”

“... HUAC: Is your brother a member of the Communist Party? Robert Oppenheimer: He is not a member of the Communist Party, to the best of my knowledge. HUAC: Are you speaking as of the present time? Robert Oppenheimer: I am, sir. HUAC: Was he a member of the Communist Party in the past? Robert Oppenheimer: Mr Chairman, I will answer the questions you put to me ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... We do get some proper dates as we go along. Sibil was born in 1971; she met her future husband, Robert, when she was 16. We never find out when they got married, but we do know that they opened a clothes store in Shreveport, Louisiana; that they ran out of money when an investor pulled out of the business; and that they decided to solve their problems by ...”