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“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”

“... were three other people in the dock, charged with conspiracy to cause explosions. One of them was Michael Murray, a workmate of two of the six, who made no secret of his membership of the IRA. In the best IRA tradition he chose not to participate in the proceedings. His presence in the dock alongside the six was deeply damaging to their case. This is no doubt ...”

“... The stocking cap, solid black on top and red-ribbed across the tube, an eye popping out at the face end. Red outline for ear, forked red line for mouth, blue-grey near-rectangle vertically placed for shoulder. These lines and shapes precipitate a face, itself un-outlined, from out of white space, the unmistakable head of Harpo Marx ...”

“... the neck of a broken bottle lying on the bank glimmered in the moonlight, and that the shadows lay black under the millwheel. There you have a moonlit night before your eyes, but I speak of the shimmering light, the twinkling stars, the distant sounds of a piano melting into the still and scented air, and the result is abominable.Paustovsky is a ...”

“... What’s striking about McEwan’s later work – I’m thinking particularly of The Innocent, Black Dogs and his new novel Enduring Love – is its intimacy with evasion and failure, combined with an alert intelligence about these things which itself looks like grounds for hope. McEwan’s characters talk past each other, go manic, stumble into ...”

“... most of the world’s supply of the gems. It appears never to have occurred to them that the black migrants who dig the diamonds out of the ground have any grievances. A much more serious problem for the mining companies has been that the miners might steal diamonds, swallow them, excrete them and sell them on the open market. This is one of the reasons ...”

“... the first of six Pontic rulers to bear the name Mithridates had welded the Greek cities of the Black Sea coast to the Persian and Anatolian lands of the interior to create one of the most successful such mini-states. Mithridates Eupator could likewise face in both directions, a cultured Greek on the one hand, with a fabricated ancestry stretching back to ...”

“... anyone could make. I keep wondering how the film manages to stay so light in spite of the notional black comedy of its plot. I think it has something to do with the sense of being out of time that I mentioned earlier: not timeless, but resistant to time. The film is about ingenuity and pleasure taking over from need, and this goes for its casting as well as ...”

“... Chaplin made when everyone else had turned to sound. Have I mentioned that the whole thing is in black and white? The Artist is not a silent film, though, and not a reconstruction of one. It is a silenced film, in which almost all noise except the off-story music has been suppressed. We don’t hear people speak within the film, and we don’t hear any ...”

“... American, the CIA chief played with impeccable, icy charm by Robin Wright, hair cut short and dyed black, but otherwise much in the style of her role in the American version of House of Cards. She and Bachmann have a remarkable exchange about their goals, about what all this secrecy and illegality and interference is for. ‘It’s about saving lives,’ she ...”

“... hangings; the two white men among the condemned get to make speeches, while the Indian just has a black sack pulled unceremoniously over his face. And above all we have Jeff Bridges in place of John Wayne. The two men don’t look all that different: shabby and decaying and old, far older than the character in the book can be, if he dies at the age of 68 and ...”

“... tells her it’s time to go back to sleep. She does, having paused only to chat with her black and white guinea pig, which she keeps in a cage close to her bed; just a little girl, just a moment of childhood. In the next scene the three girls are having their hair brushed and being told they must kiss their father before they do anything else. This ...”

“... when Varda, in The Beaches of Agnès, lets her camera run slowly in close-up over Demy’s grey-black hair, finally finding a face at the end of what seemed to be a tour of a forest or a field, I know we are seeing a bit of once cherished organic matter as an instance of ultimate otherness, the way anyone might look when no one is looking. No one except the ...”

“... to take in small doses. As a younger man he appears in clips as the street artist, dressed in black, wearing a crumpled top hat, riding a monocycle at great speed through a crowd, sometimes juggling skittles as he goes. We also see him practising for his great adventure; and performing two earlier sensational coups, a wire-walk between the towers of ...”

“... a few grand words that appear in both book and movie. In the other corner, the exotic, often black, frequently masked, elaborately decorated, elephant-riding, despot-serving nations of the Persian Empire. You can see there is a clash of styles here, particularly in the matter of metal ornaments stuck in the face – the Persian King Xerxes (played by ...”