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“... there were no Martians to invade or be invaded by? The time setting of the story told by Ridley Scott’s The Martian is scrupulously unmentioned in the film or in the Andy Weir book it is based on, but nerdy fans have figured it out from internal evidence centring on the astral timing of Thanksgiving. It is 2035. Weir has confirmed that this is ...”

“... Gershwin (Shall We Dance) as composers. There is some amazing dialogue (in this case by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano – Allan Scott is credited on all three movies): ‘What are the grounds for divorce in New Jersey?’ ‘Marriage’; ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know you well enough to tell you the ...”

“... or settings, we shift from a gay bar to a movie set to a modest California home; a young man, Scott Thorson, played by Matt Damon, is taken to a Liberace show in Las Vegas, meets the great man backstage and is invited to lunch the next day. Thorson is star struck, dazzled by Liberace’s piano playing, especially when he doubles the tempo in his ...”

“... it was was mercifully unknown to me. Above all, I did not know that the company chairman, Laurance Scott – a Scott of Scotts and therefore a man who could be assumed to be committed to the idea of C.P. Scott’s Manchester Guardian – had effectively lost faith in the paper’s ability ...”

“... The date​ of the story in Ridley Scott’s new alien movie is 2104, ten years after the messy, murderous events that put an end to the previous prequel, Prometheus (2012). True to the tradition of the franchise, virtually the whole crew of a spaceship is wiped out in both films. Alien (1979) ended with Sigourney Weaver’s voice saying into the ship’s log: ‘This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off ...”

“... so forth – but their influence is hard to spot in his work, and given that the first volume of Scott Moncrieff’s translation of A la recherche didn’t appear for another five years, acquaintance with Proust seems out of the question. Tombe complimented his disciple on his prose: ‘Your style is excellent, and graceful,’ he told him in a ...”

“... saving James Stewart’s life. In The Spoilers she uses her charms to lure the bad guy (Randolph Scott) to his doom. These gestures make us think again about what it is she has that looks like innocence but isn’t.Let’s return to The Scarlet Empress for a moment. One of the first things we learn from the credits is that it has ‘a supporting cast of one ...”

“... Most loyal and protective of Gurney’s many friends, Marion Scott wrote after one of her regular visits to the asylum: ‘Ivor is so heart-breakingly sane in his insanity.’ Letters, reported conversation, music, poems all attest to the fact. He was trained and already admired as a composer before enlistment; in the trenches poetry had occupied him more and more and, when he returned afterwards to music, the poetry continued ...”

“... policeman is the fellow to do it. The best line in the movie goes to Crystal, played by Kristin Scott Thomas with nasty vulgar authority. She talks tough, bosses everyone around, insists on the superiority of her dead son over his pathetic younger brother, and generally expects to get what she wants. When Julian tells her what Billy had done, she says ...”

“... to know so well what it means to leave their fantasy roles behind, to be bereft of magic. A.O. Scott, thinking not only of this movie, recently said of Driver that he was like a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces. This is how he manages to be a cipher when needed (in BlacKkKlansman, say) and a person who in Marriage Story knows how to combine arrogance and ...”

“... job as man in charge of the aliens’ relocation – a move that makes nepotism look bad, as A.O. Scott said in the New York Times. But these are just bad guys: the really evil guys are the Nigerians who have set up an empire of organised crime in the aliens’ camp: they sell cat food to the inhabitants as if it was caviar, deal in weapons and inter-species ...”

“... for three years as an infantry officer in France. In 1975 he was moved to write to the historian Michael Howard by exasperation with Paul Fussell’s newly published The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, an American critic and veteran of World War Two, suggested that what had happened to those who fought in France was so uniquely dreadful that it defied ...”

“... a bungled invention. Vidal knows this very well, and speaks, in Pink Triangle and Yellow Star, of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald wanting not to go into movies but ‘to live as if they were inside a movie. Cut to Antibes. Dissolve to the Ritz in Paris.’ But Vidal himself has a perfectly clear sense of the real as real. ‘A movie is a response to reality,’ he ...”

“... of a fence. Once Santana has got a good enough view, he holds the camera steady and we see Walter Scott, a man of about fifty, abruptly running away from a policeman, Michael Slager, who then discharges eight rounds from his revolver, five of which hit Scott in the back. ...”

“... If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it follows that the enemy of Michael Howard is my hero. So awful was Howard’s long reign at the Home Office that many liberals sought democratic relief from the most blatantly undemocratic section of the establishment: the judiciary. It was the strange sound of Law Lords denouncing Howard’s preposterous insistence that ‘prison works’ and the widespread jubilation at his many snubbings in the courts that led to liberal hosannas for the judges ...”