“... offices were full of people at the very edge of their tolerance. Families were cracking with it, young folk were losing their way, former workers were losing the place. I watched the woman at the desk next to mine offering grown men ‘positions’ in something called the Job Club, where they could learn how to fill in an application form or make a telephone ...”

“... it. She magnified it to the point where she got very self-destructive. She couldn’t handle being young and almost beautiful.’ There’s a moment in Rebel without a Cause, when Jim Stark (played by James Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo) climb up to an old Hollywood mansion that’s now lying empty. They pretend they’re going to live there ...”

“... Details came out in a public hearing at which his wife, Ellen, needing to educate their three young sons, tried to bar him from dissipating the fortune that he had inherited from his father. Before it ended, Scott absconded once more to France. ‘I am in rather a droll position,’ he told a friend: I have been declared legally a lunatic and, though ...”

“... to make it through his life. Standing before his mother’s flag-draped coffin, the photogenic young stoic asked himself a question. ‘Is Mummy a patriot? What does Mummy really think of Britain? Has anyone bothered to ask her? When will I be able to ask her myself?’ We have waited for a royal person who could ask such questions. He tells us he cares ...”

“... Soviet institutions, was the perpetuator of many of the old views and practices. The conclusion of Andrew’s and Gordievsky’s lucid and detailed history – that sooner or later the KGB ‘will be disowned by its own citizens’ – provides a necessary benchmark which Soviet reform must reach if it is to be taken seriously, most of all by Russians. The KGB ...”

“... contrast to the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, which arose from a sexual escapade, that of Andrew Johnson 130 years earlier involved some of the most intractable problems in American history. How should the nation be reunited after the Civil War? Who is entitled to American citizenship and the right to vote? What should be the status of the four ...”

“... advertisers happy and the mind empty. Kitty Kelley’s books arrived in my life when I was quite young. They seemed almost dazzlingly competent, frighteningly readable, partaking of the same notions of glitz and sex, power and money, falsehood, revenge, hubris and comeuppance that had characterised an earlier kind of bestseller, airport novels written by ...”

“... indecisive’. Aside from wanting to preserve the monarchy and his role as commander-in-chief, the young monarch appeared to hold few strong views. In the estimation of US officials, he was ‘a weak reed’ who ‘lacks guts’. No one saw him as preferable to Mossadegh. Roosevelt eventually settled on General Fazlollah Zahedi, described in a CIA profile as ...”

“... after he got tired of being a schoolmaster. He once said he had liked teaching because it kept him young, but acting let him be other people, and in the 1940s he thrived, voicing the RAF documentary Squadron 992 and appearing as the compere in the variety show Rainbow Round the Corner. Along with the BBC’s senior announcer, Leslie Mitchell, he became a voice ...”

“... Yates’ is harder to account for. The novel depicts a romantic relationship between two young people from the beginning to what could be the end, and the light cast on each lover is harsh: the young man is cruel, the girl (she’s 16, her lover is 22) is dishonest, and each expects too much from the other. In all ...”

“... Announcing the winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize, Andrew Marr was pleased to be able to say that none of the shortlisted books was the obvious result of a publisher’s ‘wheeze’, or the so-called biography of something which couldn’t in all honesty be said ever to have had a life. One of the more glaring recent additions to the latter category is Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography by Dominic Streatfeild (Virgin, £20 ...”

“... curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got no sense of history,’ he said, then he laughed. ‘And you got none neither,’ she said, pressing the tissue into her sleeve. Only ten minutes’ walk from the Kennedy house in Brookline, another ...”

“... at something he finds hard to bear. The brief biographies of 19th-century alienists through which Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey tell the story of the century’s dealings with the mad make it clear that Morison’s haunted expression could have been that of any of the seven ‘mad-doctors’ described here. The first of them was born ...”

“... representations equal ‘positive’ social change. Even the editor of No Sweat, Andrew Ross, slips into this thinking. Commenting on the black models who have begun to appear in ads for Hilfiger and other companies, he notes that ‘such images, presented as the epitome of beauty, are a notable breakthrough in a history of public aesthetics ...”

“... As well as a group of poets, the magazine also had some energetic and intelligent new critics: young hoods not afraid to wield an axe. It seemed to matter terribly that people didn’t get things wrong, that poetry – as we confidently understood it – didn’t get turned into something else: something flashier, more prosy, more glamorous, more ...”