“... exposure of Rae’s bottom is arousing,’ Thomson notes.) There it is again, pink and bare, in Billy Bathgate, where she is the moll of Dustin Hoffman’s hopelessly unconvincing gangster boss (1991). And again in that schlocky piece of nonsense, Malice (1993), where she works in a childcare centre and wears ‘baggy jeans and flannel shirts’ by day but ...”

“... from Paris in 1952 when the aeroplane – ‘it was an Air France: Air Chance is a better name’ – ‘caught fire and scenes of extraordinary panic occurred’. Berlin mentions this, jokily and in passing, in several letters, but Alice James, the wife of William James’s son Billy, gets the full story of the ...”

“... Palace. So the president of the board, John Cam Hobhouse, decided to send the presents back. King Billy didn’t mind a bit. He roared with laughter at the idea that he might have accepted the stuff. The elephants were sent off to various English zoos and the horses to the royal stud, on the grounds that it was unfair to subject them to another long sea ...”

“... star, all while under house arrest in an East Village apartment. Following his release from jail, Billy McFarland, the man behind Fyre Festival (where attendees expecting luxury were put up in disaster relief tents as opposed to partying with celebrities on the white sands of the Bahamas etc), announced that he was doing the same thing all over ...”

“... has convinced her that her revulsion might really be desire, and her divorced musicologist friend, Billy. It’s not so much a marriage plot – Min is already married to George, a man so useless he ‘hasn’t got the larynx’ to deliver ‘Umm?’ convincingly – as a peg on which Tonks can hang Min’s longing for a less immediately stultifying life.Tonks ...”

“... dumb as not to see that the two drag artists, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, were men (the director, Billy Wilder, clearly agreed with her, filming in black and white: colour would have been a giveaway). Monroe was a would-be breakout artist. ‘If I hadn’t become popular,’ she said to Weatherby, ‘I’d still be a Hollywood slave.’ The civil rights ...”

“... Julius was the original name, but one may as well call him Groucho, from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s ...”

“... the CIA and the Pentagon, on Clinton and Alan Greenspan, carrying on at the Post as well, making a name for himself as a reporter and author others wished to emulate. He’d brought down a president: journalistically, what can beat that? He’s now more famous and must be wealthier than any other newspaperman, every book a national bestseller, and so ...”

“... the CWGC’s literary adviser, called a ‘stark sword brooding on [its] bosom’. ‘Their name liveth for evermore’, a text Kipling chose from Ecclesiasticus, appears at the larger war cemeteries. Such imagery turned conscription into crusade, slaughter into sacrifice. Tezze was devastated during the First World War, which isn’t surprising, given ...”

“... She’s played by Catherine Deneuve, who co-stars with Juliette Binoche. The only other name on the list is, as it has to be, that of the diva to end all divas, Greta Garbo – ‘G.G.’ to her closest associates. With Garbo, the process of distillation out of which stars are made reached a limit so absolute that hardly anything remains by way of ...”

“... a spitter – in other words, a ‘gentleman of the old Virginia school’. His children kept pet billy goats and played tennis and squash on their own courts. Nancy’s older sister Irene was the more celebrated beauty – she was the original Gibson Girl – but Nancy was fiercer (she once killed a moccasin snake with her riding crop). The Langhorne ...”

“... seems to have been a bus driver in Weybridge first mentioned as Tom Palmer: ‘I think that is his name,’ Forster says, with wise caution, since he was actually called Arthur Barnet, and had a wife called Bess. (In his biography Furbank was obliged to call him Arthur B–– and her Madge; Wendy Moffat sets the record straight.) He was mixed-race (‘In his ...”

“... made a devilishly catchy new sound out of country dash and bluesy holler and after-hours leer. The name of the studio was Sun: flash, heat, escaping light. Ra worship in this other Memphis. Teenage culture’s own A-bomb, with so much fallout to come. It’s debatable whether those first recordings can now contain all the weight they’ve been made to ...”

“... of amusing or abject trash. Whatever genre he tried, he seemed to be working at a role that had no name: critic, prophet, consoler, moral historian. His first book, omitted from the Library of America edition of his work, was a volume of lyrics, Permit Me Voyage, its title drawn from a line by Hart Crane with a tougher edge than the borrowing may indicate; an ...”

“... stretch to the ‘H’. Rather embarrassed for her, that she can’t pick who I am, I slip her my name of the day. I claim I’m an Indian brave. I claim I’m Sir Launcelot. I claim I’m the parish priest and she doesn’t quibble. I give her a blessing; she says: ‘Thank you, Father.’I sit on the stairs, which are steep, box-like, dark. I think I am ...”