“... offshoots – or contracts for organisations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Ford Foundation, which seemed at first to exist for scarcely any purpose other than to further US foreign policy and provide cover for the CIA’s machinations. Ford’s present reputation and munificence in Asia, Africa and ...”

“... play Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Other actors had been mentioned, including Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum and Sinatra. But Coppola held out; he shot a test in which Marlon made himself up as the old don, and set about finding a creaking, breathless voice for him. Then, in a trice, there was Brando, enthroned for that first scene, with a kitten in his ...”

“... out Nixon’s order to fire Cox; Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, followed. Eventually Robert Bork, the solicitor-general and next in the chain of command at Justice, sacked Cox. Ziegler announced the abolition of the special prosecutor’s office. But the public outcry at the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ was so great that Nixon was forced to ...”

“... saved with the £61 he was paid for the stamp. He later left farming and became the governor of Ford Open Prison. Once again the stamp went to ground. During the Thirties, the brothers Maurice and Norman Williams, who founded Stamp Review, kept an eye out for any mention of the Lake Taupo in the specialist literature. There was not much to go on, aside from ...”

“... pulled the piece in the second edition and admonished the journalist. Even Brady is persuaded that Robert Wise’s defensive protestations about the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons amount to a proven charge of obscurity and indecisiveness on Welles’s part. But the memo from Welles to Wise that he quotes from as evidence is perfectly ...”

“... compared Coppard to Hardy, Kipling and D.H. Lawrence, and he was acclaimed by (among others) Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Cowley and, later, Doris Lessing. Though his most productive decade was the 1920s, and he was well enough known by 1931 for a bibliography of his work to be published (with interjections from himself ...”

“... children, dark, hoarded property. The golden stone of its modest neoclassical façade, designed by Robert Edis in 1883, blends into the street front overlooking Green Park. If you had to guess what lay inside you might hazard a hedge fund, or a tax avoidance consultancy, or empty space, left to fatten. Experimental art and its practitioners, surely, left ...”

“... time he went at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and attracted the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five poems from a ...”

“... general, waste good material on his correspondents. He was, he wrote to the Hungarian film-maker Robert Lazlo, ‘a bad letter-writer’. His replies were terse, polite and to the point. ‘I wish I could write you as interesting letters as you write to me, but nothing goes on outside my window except blue sea and mountains,’ he wrote to Skvorecky. His ...”

“... in these abstract Modernists. One of the many things that is so interesting about him, and that Robert Ferguson illuminates in this first thorough biography, is his redescription of original sin as the best way of talking about ineluctable human limitations. In his own combative, unacademic way he was trying to work out why original sin, even in its secular ...”

“... the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the stuff) or by ...”

“... be the ‘Shame of a Nation’. But many people unashamedly rooted for the gangsters. As Francis Ford Coppola would observe when he made the first two Godfather films, the set was crowded whenever they were doing shoot-’em-up scenes. And ‘Scarface’ was plainly an allusion to Al Capone, one of the first men sent to Alcatraz (he was prisoner number ...”

“... great mocking titles, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, or Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration), The Innocent and Spring. I want to say that here is a newish, youngish – early forties – contemporary British novelist worth catching up on and following, in the wake of and on a level with the likes of James Buchan, Tessa Hadley and ...”

“... Indeed how alike are the Tory Party of today and that of 1968, when Lord Blake delivered the Ford Lectures that form the backbone of this book? Is it only the faulty perspective of daily politics that makes one wonder whether the gap between the Tory Party of Margaret Thatcher and that of Harold Macmillan is greater than the gap between Macmillan and the ...”

“... insists that he and his colleagues ‘always did love … a cinema that is haunted by writing’. Robert Bresson said much the same thing: ‘Cinema is not a spectacle. It’s a kind of writing.’ There is a wonderful, casual-seeming evocation of this thought in Daney’s essay from 1969 on Pasolini’s Teorema. He says we know what the desert at the end of ...”