“... RKO contract player who had just been nominated for an Oscar for Crossfire, played a young singer (though she didn’t sing herself). By 1 June, when Ray and Grahame married in Las Vegas, she was four months pregnant with their son Tim. When Bogart bought the rights to Hughes’s novel, he imagined Lauren Bacall for the role of Laurel Gray. The couple ...”

“... and radio biographies but also in a few books, such as the biographies of Norman Mailer by Peter Manso (1985) and Truman Capote by George Plimpton (1997). Plimpton had previously been involved in what may have been the earliest significant biography of this kind, Edie: An American Biography ‘by Jean Stein edited with George Plimpton’, published in ...”

“... of France’s fortifications along its eastern border with Germany. Donald and his brother, Peter, are not yet proficient enough in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual ...”

“... coincided with the eruption of identity politics among an affluent minority in the US. As Peter Novick clarifies in startling detail in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), the Shoah ‘didn’t loom that large’ in the life of America’s Jews until the late 1960s. Only a few books and films touched on the subject. The film Judgment at Nuremberg ...”

“... are those most burdened by meaning, and that a world which proffers total transparency – what Peter Brooks called the melodramatic ‘world of hyper-significant signs’ – actually yields nothing of the sort. Blue Velvet is the story of Jeffrey Beaumont, a college student played by MacLachlan, who discovers a seedy nether-city of sexual ...”

“... Simon and Garfunkel, Otis Redding and Janis Joplin, who he said reminded him of an old-school jazz singer like Bessie Smith, but was saddened by Hendrix and The Who, with their sacrilegious destruction of instruments. ‘I am immediately repulsed by anything ugly that sends out bad vibrations,’ he wrote in 1968.In the context of 1960s hippie ...”

“... he’s given to such formulations as ‘my capital literary agent’ and ‘the amiable singer Cliff Richard’. Repetitive, prolix, not always persuasive in his reasoning and given to occasional dark murmurs about conspiracies, Tolstoy sometimes seems like a character out of Pale Fire. But his biography wrestles honestly with his stepfather’s ...”

“... too, in some cases worker-historians, like the printer John Gorman, or the Communist singer Ewan MacColl, pioneered the discovery of industrial folk song – a continuing component in British Pop as well as an important source for the study of mores – and the study of popular imagery. Above all, there has been the growth of oral history, a ...”

“... with disgust ‘smirking and speaking rather loud’ at London parties, ‘where no one fits the singer to his song’, or ‘On the Asylum Road’, where she is one of the crowd passing the darkened windows which cut off the inmates, or ‘Saturday Market’, where a wretched woman tries to hide her disgrace under her shawl and sets the market ‘grinning ...”

“... press, but the press talked about her, and after her scandalous romance with the divorced Captain Peter Townsend they talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as the id of the Windsors, beside her twinkling mother and impeccably dutiful sister. Margaret moved with the ‘fast’ set, drank, smoked and sometimes looked bored at official events. By ...”

“... his novel set in 18th-century Naples. In Les Trois Femmes de ma vie the young Dominique listens to Peter Pears singing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a booth at the HMV shop on Oxford Street, with a thrilled sense of eavesdropping on two levels of erotic complicity, not only between Michelangelo and his beloved but also between ...”

“... postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within it. It was her natural mode to épater les bourgeois, starting with her ...”

“... of struggling would-be stardom in Beckenham. He’d been in half a dozen bands as a saxophonist, a singer and a mime artist; he’d styled himself as a Mod, a hippy and a Buddhist; he’d called himself Davie Jones, David Jay and David Bowie (after Richard Widmark’s portrayal of Jim Bowie in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”

“... was born Barbara Joan Streisand in 1942 in Brooklyn. Her mother, Diana Rosen, was a gifted singer; Streisand never shook the feeling that her mother was jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the Catskills, and Streisand, her mother and nine-year-old brother moved first to her maternal ...”