“... we are told, and soon we are settling down with our narrator in the front parlour of the family home in ‘rain-lashed industrial South Wales’, watching old comedy movies on a Coronation-era TV with a wonky contrast-control. Next we learn how he transferred his affection from Wisdom to Sellers and became so enamoured of his new idol that ‘I used to want ...”

“... preoccupations. As a set of practical proposals on how a society could make its members fully at home in the world, it has at all stages been beneath contempt. But as a somewhat fumbling attempt to express a central ideal of social relations (an ideal which no decent society can afford wholly to forget), it retains the greatest urgency. For one thing, it ...”

“... Show to talk about his book Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Leading a Better Life, he told Jon Stewart that he’d been inspired by his ‘buddy’, a war hero, who after returning home had become an unemployed alcoholic still afraid of sniper fire. ‘I started writing him a letter about resilience, about how you deal ...”

“... was a big part of his national appeal. More pragmatism, less BS. It’s the same argument Rory Stewart gave for quitting national politics in order to run for mayor of London, before the pandemic put a stop to that. Being mayor was the only way you could be sure you were making a difference to people’s lives. Emanuel sums it up: city government is ...”

“... made would be ‘an explosion in the heart of the commodity’, to borrow a phrase from Mark Stewart, the singer in the post-punk outfit the Pop Group and in the years before punk a regular visitor to the King’s Road store. A few years earlier, around the time McLaren and Westwood were starting out in youth fashion, the urban guerrillas of the Angry ...”

“... kitsch … massively influenced avant-garde fashion and interiors … Andrew Logan’s studio-cum-home in Hackney, London … featured a wardrobe fronted by Astroturf, a mannequin torso as a fountain … a plaster Alsatian. A heightened interest in the look of things and in what that meant was also evident in academia. Roland Barthes’s Mythologies was ...”

“... them from the attempts which they now seem to be making to deal with the PKI’. Michael Stewart, then Foreign Secretary, seems to have seen the imposition of military order as good for business. ‘It is only the economic chaos of Indonesia which prevents that country from offering great potential opportunities to British exporters,’ he wrote to ...”

“... You are Margaret Oliphant Vous êtes Margaret Oliphant Sie sind Margaret Oliphant I love my home, its lares et penates Of broken shoe buckles, balls of green wool, Needles, its improvisatory architecture Feeding my work with interruptions, turns Snatched, forty-winked; stashed seed pearls in a dish Radiate homely, incarnational light Sometimes the green ...”

“... and ‘Connie’ in his index.) In this way, Gray began slowly to build up a reputation in his home country, while the leaking of fragments of Lanark to literary magazines helped to spread rumours that something exceptional was taking shape. This sprawling, ambitious work began life as two separate novels, one autobiographical, one fantastic. At its heart ...”

“... is the literary equivalent of discovering that you have invited a kleptomaniac into your home. In fact the ‘lie’ about filmmaking in upstate New York is close to what really happened, though there wasn’t a collective, just Meadow inviting her old friend Carrie Wexler on a visit to see the footage of trains she had shot with equipment paid for ...”

“... God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ Visiting Northern Ireland as home secretary in 1970, Reginald Maudling, whose mellow moderation verged on a slothful desire for an easy life, was understandably exasperated by the Ulster problem – but no more so than a long line of politicians, before and since. Churchill – not so easily ...”

“... Clift to laconic statements of respect (‘He’ll do’) and friendship (‘I’m glad you came home cause ... well, I’m glad you came home’). In Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), admirable comedies with Cary Grant (who graced five of his and four of Hitchcock’s most characteristic films), he added ...”

“... the children that the literary ghosting began. She needed the money and it was a chance to work at home in Fife.Erdal wants her first book under her own name to be more than a witty account of a funny situation. The need for intellectual recognition shows in the alarming number of cultural name-checks which clutter her text. In no particular order, and often ...”

“... of self-importance. He was a deliberately hopeless soldier in the Pinewood Studios unit of the Home Guard, and, having volunteered to do a stint at a Naafi-style cafeteria, he would serve the food with one hand while reading the copy of Shakespeare’s plays he was holding in the other. But he was moved by the ‘red flame of love and comradeship’ he saw ...”

“... tanned Mr Lucky, a Beverly Hills rake, had once been Archie Leach, a pale kid from a cold, unhappy home in Bristol.That was the magical cut in his career. It isn’t simply that some of his films are among the best or most enduring ever made. They show the mysterious rendering of an admirable yet unreliable paragon, who seems to be watching us. His reticent ...”