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“... they were not at home, stayed at the best hotels, where in the words of the leading character in Wes Anderson’s new film, their needs were met ‘before the needs were needed’. The wealthy were pampered, and the pampered felt wealthy. Is the Grand Budapest Hotel of the movie in Budapest? How could you ask? Budapest is just a name, a link to Eastern ...”

“... Wes Anderson’s​ new film, Asteroid City, is like a cartoon without the toons. It’s true that the alien who descends (twice) into the picture looks like a drawing of a long-legged human tadpole. Similarly, the desert where much of the film is set looks less like an actual landscape than a sketch of somebody’s idea of such a place, complete with squiggled humps serving as mesas ...”

“... and a Bill Manhire, and a W.B. Yeats (‘What can I but enumerate old themes?’), there is also a Wes Anderson: Bird writes to be loved, to fold what is embarrassing about her temperament into what is winsome, what’s cool or cold into what’s intimate and warm. ‘What’s the point of saying new things?’ another poem begins. Perhaps we seek only ...”

“... in a novel narrated by a taxidermist. One can easily enough imagine the house in Hide as a Wes Anderson set, cluttered with deer heads and saccharine little dioramas such as the ‘turn-of-the-century squirrel couple out courting’ that Wendell has arranged in his studio. And there is something Salingeresque in Wendell’s early ruminations on ...”

“... motive is ‘monetary gain, and to bring Black Harlem down a notch’. Pepper turns up last in a Wes Anderson-esque bellhop uniform and with ‘gravel eyes that made you stare at your feet’. (The hotel elevator becomes a character in its own right, recalling Whitehead’s 1999 novel The Intuitionist, in which the first Black woman to be accepted into ...”

“... you can trust. In his telling of the Redgraves they come across rather like characters in a Wes Anderson movie (The Royal Tenenbaums or Moonrise Kingdom): all unusually talented in their different ways and incestuously close, yet somehow closed off in their own little worlds. Occasionally, Redgraves have shown a desire to move away from the ...”

“... drifts of Michaelmas daisies, and grey-blue pools of agapanthus lilies.It’s like a scene from a Wes Anderson film. You are immersed in one set of details until your eye is drawn by a sudden shift in focus to what lies beyond or slightly outside the frame. The serpents, the flesh-eating dahlias, and above all the artificiality of the tableau foreshadow ...”

“... story, which chronicles the showbiz mores of a bewildering galaxy of cartoon characters – Silver Anderson, Mannon Cable, Jack Python, Jade Johnson, Whitney Valentine – lurks an italicised sub-plot. This tells of an unnamed victim of sexual abuse who falls into the quite plausible routine of torching her abusers to a charred crisp in their own homes. When ...”