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“... We travellers are in very hard circumstances,’ said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. ‘If we tell anything new we are laughed at as fabulous.’ This mistrust of the footloose is endorsed by the trenchant definition of ‘traveller’s tale’ in Chambers’ Dictionary: ‘an astounding lie about what one professes to have seen abroad’. To be sure, this batch of 19th-century travellers’ tales features some astounding liars, but there are also some reasonably honest witnesses ...”

“... Ford seems to me claptrap in that it amounts to the prettification of a lie . . . Ford’s visual grace, it seems to me, needs the flush of drink in the viewer before it is sufficiently lulling to disguise the lack of intellectual integrity . . . It is sometimes claimed that Ford is a superb visual storyteller; that he unerringly places his camera and edits ...”

“... son he was Of Solway and of Westminster – O, maker, maker, Given of all the gods to anything but grace. And kind as all the apprentices knew and scholars; A talker with battle honours till dawn whitened the curtains, With many honourers, and many many enemies, and followers. The third line here conveys what Leavis would call ‘a limiting judgment’; and ...”

“... again,’ indeed, so long as that noun carries no irony but only the acknowledgment of a fall from grace. Sorley’s was the generation, the truly lost one, that might have kept the best of the old world and changed the rest of it, or some of it. Ivor Gurney’s fate was worse and also better. ‘May 1925 see us both happy and revered by the few who count and ...”

“... to avoid a national explosion of anger. His instinct was right, as the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace proved later that year. This was the most serious challenge to the Tudor monarchy across the entire century, and was nearly fatal to Cromwell’s own career. He was already shouldering the blame for knocking all those ruins about a bit. And yet, if we ...”

“... First day of shooting a film based on the life of Joe Orton. We begin with the childhood scenes, Thornton Heath standing in for Leicester. The film is announced in Variety. The title Prick up your ears presents a problem as Variety’s cryptic style demands the film be known as Prick. But no. The headline reads: ‘Ears lenses Monday.’ Those best at saying ...”

“... reticent woman and a man who wants to possess and reconstruct her. It was to have marked Grace Kelly’s return to the screen after the marriage that made her a princess, but in a referendum the citizens of Monaco registered their disapproval, and the part went to Tippi Hedren instead. Marnie is a thief, and what drew Hitchcock to the project, he ...”

“... cut hedges, tidy gravel, unpeopled courts and rooms: only beneath the awe-inspiring gateway of Thornton Abbey does a sheepish lady in a red hat smile at the photographer. This landscape is unreal even for today. Where are the motorcars, the lawn-mowers, the ice-cream vans, the Saturday afternoon bikers, the bored children, the ignorant tourists, and our ...”

“... between ceremonial formal law and established forms, on the one hand, and faith and free grace on the other. But that is about as far as Huntington takes us towards Blake. For Huntington was a High Tory, and he busied himself disciplining those members of his flock who were influenced by Tom Paine or by the prophet Richard Brothers (‘God’s ...”

“... and would work closely with them (he approached Hemingway, Hammett and Nabokov, and employed Thornton Wilder, Steinbeck, Chandler, Brian Moore and Anthony Shaffer). Spoto has found many ready to testify to Hitchcock’s inadequacy without them (like Brian Moore of Torn Curtain: ‘I found that he had absolutely no concept of character’); and to his ...”

“... worst piece of luck may have been the brooding presence in his household throughout his fall from grace of his second living son, Stanislaus, who described what happened to the family with bitterness and in some detail in two books, both published after his death, My Brother’s Keeper in 1958 and The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce in 1971. In My ...”

“... lately, made its fundamental importance difficult to recognise. Not until the appearance of Mark Thornton Burnett’s study, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama, barely a decade ago, did its place in early modern culture seem worth exploring. Even Burnett’s study was limited by its concentration on the humbler categories of servant, on ...”