“... and increasingly painful reading. The summaries of late 20th-century German history are fine, although not particularly revealing. It is the memoir that is the problem, not because the life it recalls was a failure but – curiously – because it was an endless stream of successes that did not keep the demons at bay. On the last page, Stern reports ...”

“... in Florida, had been the frailest excuse for the yards of shtik: Groucho instructing Chico in the fine art of bidding up the price and Chico bidding against himself until Groucho, the auctioneer, is left holding the goods. Animal Crackers, another Kaufman-Ryskind collaboration, had even less plot and was all the better for that. Groucho as Captain ...”

“... if his memoir can be trusted, the opposite is true. During rehearsals, Pacino recognised that ‘Bob’ – someone who became a very ‘dear friend’ – was ‘giving a performance that was more contained and low-key … It was beautiful. I knew that I would go in the other direction.’ Pacino’s one regret is that Mann removed a scene in which his ...”

“... stones that the others barely noticed. Or one of us would be pinned down in the canteen by Bob, the factory’s homespun philosopher, and the other would come to the rescue, jumping in on a debate about the existence of God, or the future of the Labour movement, with a smart remark or an absurdist digression. Helen was particularly good at ...”

“... the NKVD; the rest of the leadership had been arrested and worse; foreign sympathisers, including Bob Smillie, a friend of the Orwells and the Orrs, died in detention; and the POUM, which – as Helen Graham shows in The Spanish Republic at War (2002) – never amounted to a coherent force in the first place, was a sorry footnote in the larger story of the ...”

“... numerous other small ways helping Stone to deliver his novels before his editors lost patience.‘Bob once said, Kesey goes for life, but I’m going for art,’ Janice told Bell. ‘And I thought he made exactly the right decision, because all those great nights of back and forth, you know, they disappeared into the ether.’ She was speaking of the Perry ...”

“... pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops on 5 July 1972. It was ...”

“... I were there, I would just be like “Hey”.’ Not that he’s immune to celebrity. The actor Bob Balaban once asked him how to use the curl machine at the gym, and he talked about nothing else for the next two years. But the way to get me to do something is to tell me you’ll be upset if I don’t. He tucks his own treasured fanny pack into my ...”

“... Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, said that he had met with her in 1949, and thought her ‘a fine woman caught in a situation that could only destroy her’. She told him she was exhausted from a work schedule that involved ‘taking amphetamines when she got out of bed in the morning, minor stimulants during the day, a shot of morphine before fulfilling ...”

“... because he took his clothes off in it (not, incidentally, for the first time, as he did so in Bob Guccione’s Caligula; this too goes unmentioned, though more out of kindness, I would have thought). To some extent the omissions simply reflect the material that is available – the programme is archive-led. The BBC did have film of Forty Years On but lost ...”

“... a passing car, never traced. ‘He was so big and proud and conspicuous that no doubt he made a fine target for free-floating homophobia.’ Aids starts in history. Jarman was born in 1942, 25 years before male homosexuality was legalised, under certain conditions, and only in England and Wales (Scotland had to wait until 1980 and Northern Ireland until ...”

“... or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to answer. For those not directly affected, the acceptable form of exculpation and remembrance involves obliterating any consideration of dead Afghans and folding the British war ...”

“... it later when your more timid, backward-looking competitors have fallen by the wayside. That’s fine for a Silicon Valley start-up, but the Guardian isn’t one of those. It doesn’t have investors: it’s owned by a trust, the Scott Trust, forbidden by its charter from selling the organisation to a rival, floating it on the stock market or paying ...”

“... and Newham as the boroughs in the lead, with Hackney, Lewisham and Lambeth also ‘involved’. Bob Young, the head of housing policy in Newham in East London, was the most forthright of the officials quoted. Talking about 4200 new homes planned in his borough, he said: ‘What we have is a concentration of benefit-dependent people in the area. Social ...”

“... solitary, yes boundless, but will it, in its icy, empty, immense reality, do? In my head, it does fine: why seek out the final disappointment which the earlier, smaller disappointment only seeks to prevent? The point of desire is desire itself, the essential pleasure in expectation is expectation. The idea that reality is a completion of the wish is ...”