‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ —  the best lines from the movies

Many of us, I get the feeling, don’t go and see as many films as we used to, or want to. Instead we spend all our time complaining that we don’t have enough time to watch films any more. Speaking purely as a hard-working freelance, I also miss all those old black-and-white movies BBC2 used to show in the afternoon, to fill in the yawning hours between lunch and teatime. You would see things you hadn’t seen before, you would see things you had seen a million times before, and you would doze happily through all of them, while characters walked around wearing hats and talking and talking and talking more than anyone would be allowed to in the cinema of today.

George Tiffin’s All the Best Lines is a grand hardback trawl through the Golden Age of Cinema Dialogue. Possibly because they started only with images, the film business has never treated the screenwriter with much respect.