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“... Kontakte, Momente, Telemusik etc etc? The extent of KS’s achievements emerges clearly from Michael Kurtz’s biography which appears in an excellent translation by Richard Toop. Kurtz records meticulously the genesis of all KS’s works to date and gives details of his global concert-giving activity. We may not ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”

“... frankly, of good and evil. This written debate between Coetzee and the psychologist Arabella Kurtz about the role of storytelling in psychoanalysis and, more generally, in the construction and consolidation of individual identity is largely a dialogue of the deaf. Or rather, one partner in the debate is deaf, or perhaps simply resistant, while the other ...”

“... a postscript’. She has in mind the afterthought, ‘scrawled . . . in an unsteady hand’, to Kurtz’s high-minded report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ It says a lot about Didion’s own writing that she lights on a fictional proposition that is so laconic and so apparently unplanned ...”

“... close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as I’ve ever come across in the movies. But no one has ever been as repeatedly and consistently sinister, morally ...”

“... come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what he really means is ‘the major ...”

“... supporting actor, but he had delivered the central performance in modern American film. Pacino’s Michael makes a journey through the film (carried on in Part II) such as Brando never quite managed on screen. Vito is a peasant, if you like, but he’s immaculate, and in his own world. So it was that in pursuing eccentricity or solitude – wows and sighs ...”

“... chapters are centred on myths or archetypes – ‘Peter Pan’, ‘Faust’, ‘Mercury’, ‘Kurtz’, ‘Kublai Cain’, ‘Lord of Misrule’, ‘Sacred Beast’ – to suggest the themes under whose aspect Welles lived and worked. Everything is relevant here, and everything equally relevant: something that happened to the subject or something that ...”