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“... off, Sue Ellen’s name is not one to be taken lightly. In comparing her with a Mrs Hazel Pinder White, Jonathan Aitken brought on himself a legal action requiring him to kneel on the sand of Viking Bay, Broadstairs, and apologise publicly. JR’s wife, complained the plaintiff, ‘was nothing but a high-class prostitute who drank heavily and was a total ...”

“... of pain worse even than losing a child. ‘She’s my best girlfriend,’ Elvis sobbed on the white steps of Graceland when she was gone: ‘She’s all we lived for.’ Before she met Elvis’s father, she was Gladys Love Smith. Her mother was Octavia Luvenia Mansell, her great-grandmother was a Cherokee, Morning ...”

“... Batman and Robin (1997). I’m more than happy to forget the last two of those films, directed by Joel Schumacher, but the first two, both directed by Tim Burton, have much to recommend them – not least the presence of Jack Nicholson as the Joker, whose cheerful idea of havoc, very fine in its way, if essentially identical to what Nicholson is up to in most ...”

“... so he thinks. As he enters one elevator in order to descend to the lobby, Gutman’s accomplice, Joel Cairo, whom Spade already has grounds to distrust, exits from another. His failure to spot Cairo will very nearly prove fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice ...”

“... a glamorous Berlin studio portrait, her nudity is accentuated by the dangling necklace and white scarf that cover her trunk. Although these photographs all date from 1925, the year she became an international celebrity at the age of 19, they also chart the successive stages – blackface minstrelsy, African fantasy, cosmopolitan Modernism – that mark ...”

“... without, individually, ceasing to be delightful. Here, for example, is a part of his account of Joel Barlow, confined in the lazar-house at Marseille, and about to contemplate the origin of rivers and the meaning of pagan nature-cults: The cooks of the establishment kept a sturdy Provençal kitchen that made few concessions to the broiling August ...”

“... Adams and his son John Quincy. Conversely, 24 years after Andrew Jackson of Tennessee left the White House in 1837, the next generation of Southerners led 11 states out of the Union, founding a Southern Confederacy to preserve the institution of slavery from the meddling of Abraham Lincoln. As a result, the United States was temporarily dissolved, and the ...”

“... too. Lang approached two wealthy young entrepreneurs to fund the studio project, and one of them, Joel Rosenman, suggested it might make more sense to put money into a live event. Woodstock Ventures was duly constituted and the team set to work on a ‘music and arts fair’. But who would lease the land for a gathering of fifty or sixty thousand people? Lang ...”

“... in her. Things changed in the 20th century. Indeed, the modern age has overturned the assertion of White Kennet, an early 18th-century bishop of Peterborough, that ‘Qu. Elizabeth had a Camden, and King Charles a Clarendon, but poor James I has had I think none but paltry scribblers.’ The rise of the historical novel and the popular biography has produced a ...”

“... to satire has become more confused. He still likes to give his characters sub-Pynchon names – Joel Sublett, Kevin Tarkovsky, Lucius Warbaby – and to extrapolate future backdrops from contemporary anxieties: Aids, pollution and biological weapons are particular favourites, along with the menace of unregulated nanotechnology, which Gibson was on to long ...”

“... plagiarist (his speeches stole from Neil Kinnock and JFK). Age took the edge off him. Reaching the White House four years ago, he accomplished at 78 what he couldn’t manage at 45 or 65. Perhaps he’s been better at the job as a mellow old man than he would have been as a middle-aged hothead – though that is little comfort to the rest of the ...”

“... are antique shops in Stockbridge, where antique seems to mean the day before yesterday. And grand white wooden houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to be lunatic asylums. Stockbridge, peaceful home of Norman Rockwell, the people’s artist, who gave Middle America what it wanted. Stockbridge, where Melville said something unmemorable to ...”

“... which he describes as ‘broad, like her face’, and, a moment later, as ‘a sea urchin on the white ocean floor’. Van Horne’s moony and Verna’s flash would interest Alberto Moravia, whose latest novel, The Voyeur, is much concerned with sexual exhibitionism and the relations – necessary and interchangeable – between exhibitionist and ...”

“... Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer ...”

“... of young writers determined to make their mark. Dazzling no one but well-liked, he wore dashing white boots, ran through the money his mother left him and embarked on a scandalous affair with a married woman. In 1647, judging it was time he settled down, his father found him a wife, Marie Héricart. She was 14 and brought him a useful dowry. Marie has ...”