“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... which is where you’ll be shopping if you decide to follow your dream of becoming the next David Foster Wallace – who did have to work, incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any ...”

“... suggest that events in Korea in late 1950 brought the US to the brink of nuclear war. Whatever he means when he writes that ‘the knife-edge that Truman had been walking suddenly terminated above an abyss,’ the fact is that the American nuclear arsenal remained in the US under lock and key. Still, Truman was in a fix. He had initially characterised Korea ...”

“... of sugary mango chutney and what we called naan bread (not realising it was a tautology since naan means ‘bread’). For a treat our family would go to Uddin’s Manzil Tandoori Restaurant on Walton Street in Oxford (long since closed down), where my sister and I would share a mushroom biryani which came with a mixed vegetable curry in a delicious oily red ...”

“... wonders why ordinary men and women generally obey their rulers. It was a problem that perplexed David Hume as well. ‘Nothing is more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye,’ Hume wrote in 1758, ‘than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few ... When we enquire by what ...”

“... read the Lesson. But this old man is fully their match. He refuses to apply to them even though it means cutting himself off from his beloved church. I could have come here then, you think, and just seen an old man praying, seen a priest visit him on Sundays, and never realised that this still rural silence, the old man’s very immobility, those odd priestly ...”

“... that dispose one somewhat more against Tennant. Philip Hoare relates one, as told by the Hon. David Herbert, about his treatment of the actress Margaret Rutherford. He cultivated her assiduously – even, more or less, proposing marriage to her – and she fell for his charms, and then when one day she came to his house for the weekend, he quite shattered ...”

“... class and ethnic divisions and becoming world citizens. The world community could be achieved by means of visionary institutions such as an Open Conspiracy or an Air Dictatorship, or through real and fallible ones such as the UN and the League of Nations. In 1900, however, humanity’s self-destructive tendencies were symbolised by the conflict between the ...”

“... and instantly recognisable’ African rhythm) to the ‘folk-songs’ of the British Isles like ‘David of the White Rock’, ‘Loch Lomond’ and ‘Oh, No, John, No!’ All represented the ‘music of basic realities, the spontaneous expression by the people for the people of elemental emotions’. Robeson’s early preference of spirituals to ...”

“... like that, hard luck. Thus in March 1977, he records himself as saying of the Lib-Lab Pact: ‘It means the Liberals will penetrate the Official Secrets Act and know what we are doing before we tell anybody else.’ So much for democratic control; so much for hostility to the Official Secrets Act. We find the same ambiguity in his relationship with the ...”

“... complain if you’re shot. The shot tomato survives. It is 1962, and Grace’s good second means postgraduate work at London – a ‘provincial’ university in pre-Robbins phraseology. Her subject is animal behaviour – the whole gamut from molluscs to rats. In her exile she pursues a love affair begun in the summer balls of her final year, her last ...”

“... affairs secretary, and Bernard Ingham, her press officer, and a handful of personal familiars like David Wolfson and Tim Bell, it is hard to think of a single Cabinet politician, perhaps excepting the ever-supplicant Joseph, who did not eventually find themselves, after a period in the sun, banished into the half-light: the most recent victim of this expulsion ...”

“... archness when he speaks of ‘the great intellectual Western racialists such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson and G.W.F. Hegel’, finds racialist ‘truths’ less easy to come by. After all, as he points out, when blacks begin to produce ‘literature’, they make a revolution by that very activity. The eruption into ...”

“... Elton leafing through A la Carte as a substitute for actual cooking, and Emma consulting Elizabeth David for instruction in the matter of marrow-bones. Wherever the daily human comedy of manners is deployed as a cloak for our brute, indispensable appetites and satisfactions, food and drink must be present or, if absent, must expect to have their absence ...”

“... Chile. An enterprise to restore the democratic rights of the islanders was being launched with the means and symbols of old imperalist actions. The cynical culture of late capitalism, which had used a national flag for underwear or for carrier bags, switched, as it seemed overnight, to an honorific fetishism which at the same time, though in different ...”