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“... to wonder whether it is the original author (in the following case, Harriet Monroe) or the editor (Michael Grant) or you yourself who must be getting giddy: ‘While stating nothing, it suggests everything that is in his rapidly moving mind, in a series of shifting scenes which fade in and out of each other like the cinema. The form, with its play of ...”

“... head of the British Council at Ankara for help. He was the ancient historian and fellow of Trinity Michael Grant, and he put Runciman’s name forward. He got to know every inch of the city, an advantage when he came to write his lecture on the last days of Constantinople. He is not a spell-binder on the rostrum, but that lecture brings tears to the ...”

“... movies the plot doesn’t quite say what it seems to. Her rebellion, like the rebellion of Cary Grant in the same film, is not against wealth or comfort but against an idea of work that is more a religion than an ethic, a mentality that abolishes the very notions of leisure and fun. Both of them lack what the ...”

“... short poems are the two free translations from Horace, the hardy-perennial ‘Application for a Grant’ and the wonderfully up-to-date ‘An Old Malediction’ – in which Hecht finds a new sinister diminutive for the cock-teasing Pyrrha: Piranha! But these poems, it seems to me, are hardly more than by-products of the two long poems in the book: the ...”

“... clearly you don’t have the brains of a seven-year-old.’ There is the dinner party for Michael Jackson at Hepburn’s New York townhouse, where the singer is silent on all topics except the pleasure he has in watching his pet boa constrictor eat small rodents. And there is the saga of Warren Beatty, with Berg’s help, recruiting Hepburn for Love ...”

“... including Hitchcock himself narrowly missing a bus. This busy city feeling continues as Cary Grant, playing the ad man Roger Thornhill, appears dictating notes to his secretary. They start to walk uptown, then take a taxi. He gets out at the Plaza, meets some business associates in the Oak Room. Then everything shifts into an entirely different ...”

“... Young Mental Drylaw), and the streets on Fridays are blustery with witty drunks, and beautiful grant-maintained schoolgirls tuck into beastly food with savage appetites. I want to have wooden shutters and specimen plants, Georgian casements (the only artefact I’d countenance from two millennia), and ten fine days a year, fossicking at home in a ...”

“... brought together a diverse collection of historians including Eric Hobsbawm, Friedrich Heer and Michael Grant to produce single-author volumes on particular time periods and parts of the globe. Underpinning the concept, developed by its enterprising publisher George Weidenfeld, was the French idea of civilisation as encompassing material life and ...”

“... I mean. She had been in love with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, swooned over Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, and sung and danced with Yul Brynner in The King and I. This is a way of saying she wasn’t the twenty-year-old girl of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, had not lived what James called ‘a small, smothered life’, and was most ...”

“... for lynching (or justice, to make a distinction Hitchcock thought was barely tenable). If Cary Grant, in North by Northwest, has a corpse in his arms and a knife in his hands, how can we not assume he is the killer? Do we think he just happened to be there, happened to grasp the knife after the fact? We do, as a matter of fact, but that’s because we’re ...”

“... loved by his friends and this was hardly evident. Forster had written to this effect to Duncan Grant, saying that he agreed with Grant and wished he could give Joe ‘a good smack!’ But Grant hadn’t read the book yet and the letter – one of the last Forster wrote in his own hand ...”

“... a ‘heroic’ commander; the Duke of Wellington, an ‘anti-heroic’ commander; Ulysses S. Grant, a supremely unheroic commander; and a little surprisingly, Hitler, a man seldom thought of as a military commander at all but in practice a ‘false hero’ whose personal control of the German Armed Forces was no less complete than that which Alexander ...”

“... else of the Annals might look like. But something must be better than the ever popular Penguin by Michael Grant (‘When Rome was first a city, its rulers were kings’), which over its fifty years of publication has probably launched more misapprehensions of the character of Tacitus and his historical rhetoric than any other single book. For all its ...”

“... is a version of Hitchcock’s Suspicion, where a sullen Ben Affleck takes over from a suave Cary Grant. He is Nick Dunne, a writer who is not writing. His wife has disappeared on their fifth wedding anniversary, and the question is whether he has killed her. There are signs of violence in the house, but they look as if they might have been arranged to look ...”

“... new print. Everything depends here on the difference between being caught out in a lie, as Cary Grant is, and caught out in a truth, as Irene Dunne is. This is the phrase Dunne herself uses: ‘You come home and caught me in a truth – and it seems there’s nothing less logical than the truth.’ They are Jerry and Lucy Warriner, happily married, indeed ...”