“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”

“... process to oversee budgets, schedules and scripts. In Hollywood’s Golden Age, Irving Thalberg is held up by all as the epitome of the creative producer, a man of taste and collaborative skill, whose model of excellence has long since vanished from the movie-making scene. ‘No profession of producer really exists today,’ Billy Wilder said. ‘Most ...”

“... attempt to shore it up.San Francisco is often described as a cauldron of crime and depravity, and held up as proof that progressive policies don’t work. I spent some time in New Mexico last summer and found that when people heard where I was from they were aghast: they wanted to know how I was surviving the mayhem. In recent years right-wing media have ...”

“... at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... be able to take for granted could see for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its ...”

“... the fact that she was still at Bedales, by her protective older sisters, or by Noel herself, who held him at arm’s length, accepting, as Brooke’s friend Jacques Raverat put it, ‘his devotion with a calm, indifferent, detached air, as if it were something quite natural’. In the summer of 1910 Olivier agreed to become engaged to Brooke, but she wanted ...”

“... is not only in a redundant format, but in an antique form of a redundant format; the cassette is held together by metal screws. In a sure, deep voice, with an English private school accent (he and my grandfather were born and brought up in London, and went to St Paul’s) Robin describes the events of a May night and morning near the plantation where he was ...”

“... by many readers, but it was nonetheless Milton’s founding intention in composing his epic. As David Norbrook shows in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England ...”

“... Cholmeley, but in each case orchestrated by Thomas Drury. A letter discovered a few years ago by David Riggs further highlights Drury’s involvement, because it shows he had a prior connection with Lord Keeper Puckering. On 8 November 1592 Lord Buckhurst wrote to Puckering: I did speak to Mr Drury according to your Lordship’s desire, and after a long ...”

“... Usmani and in the spring, the McCormick Foundation and the ultra-con Center for Security Policy held an anti-sharia finance workshop in Illinois where his published views about jihad and the subjugation of unbelievers came under scrutiny. Media attention now turned to the Illinois mutual. In 2007, somewhere in the sprawling paperwork for a federal ...”

“... a groan when we get to the postmortem phase with a paragraph that begins: ‘The classicist David Grene, Bellow’s colleague at the Committee on Social Thought (an interdisciplinary PhD programme at the University of Chicago, also a sort of high-powered academic salon des refusés), drew an intriguing parallel between Greek comedy and The Last ...”

“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”

“... unacknowledged until Streisand was an adult. ‘The ear noises were this terrible secret that I held inside and tried to manage on my own. I didn’t expect any help from my mother anymore.’In her early teens, Streisand decided she had to become an actress. She felt she would be good at it. She began travelling into Manhattan to see plays in the $1.89 ...”

“... his concerts or recordings.)Kennedy reports a celebrated repeat in Paris in 2012 of an experiment held two years earlier in Indianapolis in which new violins were compared to old ones. The retest was rigorous enough to pass peer review in three papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ten professional violinists described as ...”