“... Board recruited Barbadians to drive our buses and to run the Underground system. It was Enoch Powell who was Minister for Health when doctors and nurses from the Commonwealth were being recruited to supply the services we required. The jobs were filled, more immigrants arrived and problems arose. The problems had two different causes, both vividly ...”

“... and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find an authentic voice: what does s/he ...”

“... for gallantry. This book has been put together from conversations recorded by John Miller and John Powell for the BBC. They were delightful broadcasts: talking off the cuff, Gielgud rambled backwards and forwards over his life; he rarely paused and then needed only the gentlest nudge to set him off again, bowling down the years. Cut together into a book, the ...”

“... not only needing applause, but needing (badly needing) other people to have a little less of it. David Frost once asked him what he wished he’d known at 20. ‘To hold my tongue,’ Gielgud said. ‘I’ve talked too much, gossiped too much.’ The fear of gossip can run a life, and sometimes ruin one; Michael Redgrave was an actor powered by ...”

“... during the Second World War Albanian campaign and describe soldiers, as Wilfred Owen or David Jones might, making their way to ‘the place where you don’t find weekdays or holidays, sick people or healthy people, poor or rich’. To possess a sunny disposition may be as much a handicap to a poet seeking approval in Britain as to come from a sunny ...”

“... from a film called Broadway Melody of 1938 in which Garland stars with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell. It was her first feature-length film for MGM. She had performed the song earlier that year at Gable’s on-set birthday celebrations: he was the studio’s biggest star. Garland made a surprise appearance at the party, posing as a die-hard fan (in some ...”

“... recording ‘Nights in the Gardens of Spain’ with Penelope Wilton, directed by Tristram Powell. She does it beautifully and Tristram keeps it simple and static, which is exactly right. [Predictably, when it comes to be transmitted it is this monologue, the simplest in form and entirely perfect in execution, which the sad creatures who preview TV ...”

“... Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US responses to genocide by her indignation at the Clinton Administration’s ...”

“... in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being shelled: ‘They must be mad. Don’t they know it’s very unsafe shooting things at other people?’ A US Sergeant in Vietnam recalled: ‘You thought, “How the fuck can they do this to ...”

“... The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of David, and his father, the widowed ...”

“... it obtains only in international conflicts, not in civil wars. And second, as the legal scholar David Marcus pointed out, the obligation on warring parties to permit relief aid ‘retreats in the face of the military necessity of blockade’. In 1998, when the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC) was negotiated, a Cuban proposal to ...”

“... become Pottery Lane is the only identifiable landmark. The studio of the photographer played by David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blow-Up is on Pottery Lane. The Grove sweeps down into Notting Dale, and passes several of the large communal gardens that are a feature of the Ladbroke Estate, and which appear in the novels of Alan Hollinghurst. People tell me ...”

“... Sr … lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana for allegedly writing a note to a white woman’; ‘David Walker, his wife and five children lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, in 1908 after Mr Walker was accused of using inappropriate language with a white woman.’ ‘Warren Powell, 14’, lynched in 1899 for ‘frightening’ a ...”

“... MP. Even his tastes in fiction, where his favourite modern authors were Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, suggested the claret-loving socialite rather than the mining-bred socialist. During his second spell at the Home Office in 1974-76 he oversaw important legislation promoting gender and racial equality, and introduced a much needed independent element into ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at ...”