“... the ones at Bobby Van’s. The core included Vogel, Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen ...”

“... on the main roads into London, they would hire coaches or post-chaises in the hope of being held up. The six men who formed the Bow Street front line were supported by a small clerical staff, whose duties included advertising crimes in the newspapers (to solicit witnesses and alert pawnbrokers) and keeping the record books, which would become invaluable ...”

“... and womanhood – whatever those might be – to the job. In the run-up to election day, she held a series of ‘women only’ events. She taunted hostile male crowds with the thought that even if they didn’t vote for her, their wives would. And so they did. Nancy begged Plymouth not to elect her with a ‘nasty, stingy little majority’ because she ...”

“... and Beowulf’. Perhaps because of the success of his popular writings, Lewis was not held in universally high regard in Oxford and was twice passed over for a professorship. In 1954 Cambridge created a new chair in Medieval and Renaissance English, and Lewis seems to have been widely regarded as the obvious contender. After a brief episode of ...”

“... on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan is a close up of its subject inhaling, eyes shut, fingers splayed; its back cover, three shots of him in different stages of smoking – an action-sequence of sorts. How ...”

“... were so vivid that they coloured the writing of the play with Oxford and Cambridge still held up to my sixth formers as citadels to be taken just as they were to me and my schoolfellows fifty years ago. I knew things had changed, of course, but I assumed that candidates for the scholarship examination spent two or three days at whichever ...”

“... outlandish, as if to proclaim to the world their individuality . . . while the Mehras . . . held to the old and ordinary ways, as if to announce to the world their inbred indifference to it.’ As children, Mehta says, he and his six siblings thought of their father ‘as educated, reasonable and compliant, and of Mamaji as uneducated, capricious and ...”

“... Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David Bowie; this must mean something. But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy.No, I was not the right reader, then, for I am more certain of the parameters of mysticism than philosophy, at least as it is practised by those who ...”

“... Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David Crouch MP, Mr Nigel Dempster, The Earl of Derby, The Duke of Devonshire ...’ And so on through the alphabet. ‘If I have inadvertently omitted anyone, I ask forgiveness. Some have asked that their help remain unacknowledged.’ Those whose good offices ...”

“... centre’ concerned with the local history of immigration. Above the tiny synagogue is the room of David Rodinsky, a Polish Jew of increasingly mysterious reputation. Latterly described as a translator and philosopher, he is said to have lived here in some sort of caretaking capacity. One day in the Sixties Rodinsky stepped out into Princelet Street and ...”

“... risk was negligible; to the patient it was critical, and she recovered damages because the court held that the patient’s and not the doctor’s appraisal of the acceptability of risk counted and that, told of the risk, she would have declined surgical intervention. Research has produced remarkable figures of risk acceptability: people will accept high risk ...”

“... version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 super-production Gone with the Wind ‘provide the scaffolding for American film history’ – although it takes us no further than the eve of the Second World War. This reading of Hollywood is anticipated by Leslie Fiedler’s ...”

“... lesson in ingenuity and hard work crowned by success after success. By the time he died he held 1093 patents across an extraordinary range of endeavour, for telegraphy, telephony, electricity, acoustics, cement housing, artificial pearls, the forerunner of the mimeograph and a way of getting electricity from coal. He also left five million pages of ...”

“... had built her own Shakespearean shrine-cum-reading-room in 1742 – more than a decade before David Garrick commissioned what had previously been considered the first Temple of Shakespeare, complete with a statue by Roubiliac, for his own garden at Hampton – made me sufficiently curious to want to renew my attempt to see her former house and ...”

“... soon gave up on that idea. In any case, her particular skills – rapid-fire dialogue and just-held-back sentiment – were better suited to the newest game in town: talking pictures. Parker had spent most of the 1920s pronouncing her aversion to the movies (‘any motion-picture theatre is as an enlarged and magnificently decorated lethal chamber to ...”