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“... Finally, there is Spycatcher. When the House of Lords forbade the publication of material from Peter Wright’s book, even though it is a best-seller in the United States and can be brought freely into Britain, there came to mind a scene from a film of my childhood. It was in Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh. Bligh orders a ...”

“... tradition, Goethe and Schiller, but unlike its sterner English precedents in Westminster Abbey (Peter Scheemakers, 1741) and Stratford (Ronald Gower, 1888), this is a portrait of the writer who circulated sugared sonnets among his private friends. Lessing’s Shakespeare half-sits on his plinth, one foot off the ground, looking quizzically to one side as if ...”

“... interviewing film stars on British TV. Taylor had recently completed her second stint at the Betty Ford Centre, where she was treated for alcoholism and other addictions and where she met her seventh and final husband, Larry Fortensky, a construction worker. ‘You are looking slim and lovely now,’ Aspel began, ‘but of course as the world knows, there was ...”

“... some way influenced the nation’s life’, this would require the inclusion not only of Henry Ford and Walt Disney, but also of the CEOs of most big American corporations in the past century. This is one of the several ways in which one runs up against the limitations, for the purposes of historical understanding, of taking individual lives and ‘the ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile. Until Bel’s recent research it was Peter Drucker, in his writings about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the ...”

“... that Auden had established in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler ...”

“... 4 p.m. Some residents were flooded for a second time in a month. In Chipping Campden, staff at a Ford dealership abandoned their premises when cars started to float out of the forecourt. In Gloucester, where most of the city centre was underwater, witnesses saw a motorist driving through a deeply flooded road crash into the back of a completely submerged ...”

“... the pleadings of Alsop to Mac Bundy did succeed in getting the latter to release a huge tranche of Ford Foundation money to endow Wolfson College, Oxford, the foundation of which was Berlin’s noblest enterprise. So perhaps he was on to something when he expatiated about ethical ‘trade-offs’ between contrasting or alternative positions: the one ...”

“... Blakey was flying off to visit her dad – and so we ended up taking Bev’s cushy, landau-like Ford Taurus, the tiny trunk of my two-seater being comically insufficient for everything that needed transporting: a Santa-Claus-sized sackful of presents for my mother and the cats; numerous bottles of boutique olive oil for Tracy and Gilbert; the melancholy ...”

“... beside a whiteboard covered in writing. The opposite wall was stencilled with a quote from Henry Ford: ‘Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right.’ Pedersen told me he had been brought over to direct a group preparing an initial batch of 32 patent applications, to be completed by April. (This was in January.) Beyond that there were ...”