“... he wasn’t romantically interested in her – seducing a string of famous pin-ups including Lana Turner, Norma Shearer and Ava Gardner, who became his first wife. ‘Who wouldn’t want to go out with me?’ Rooney asked. ‘I had my own car, I had some nickels in my pocket and I was somebody.’Being ‘somebody’ didn’t come with the same benefits for ...”

“... to give them extra zest’, while the Man Group is an investment management business, though the James Man who founded the original company was an 18th-century barrel-maker (his firm supplied the navy with rum for almost two hundred years). Touches such as Elysian’s ‘Giraffe carrot’, so large that a single specimen can fill a vegetable dish for Sunday ...”

“... generation of Marxist historians. The second major influence on me was my Cornell contemporary James Siegel, who is today, in my opinion, the most arrestingly original anthropologist in the US. He had been one of Clifford Geertz’s last students before the famous man, enraged by the rowdy student radicalism of the late 1960s, abandoned teaching for an ...”

“... to genetically engineered species of the future. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is an unlikely page-turner spanning the primordial origins of life, Nazi eugenics, and the promise and perils of gene editing. In just one short section, he considers Charlie Chaplin’s paternity trial and the partial myth of Kunta Kinte and Roots, alongside the discovery of ...”

“... Egon Schiele. Her style and method have more affinity with Giacometti than with Freud or Auerbach. James Lord’s marvellous account, published in 1965, of his long sessions sitting for Giacometti foreshadows the patient vigils that Paul exacts from her subjects. Lord relates entertainingly the way Giacometti was always dissatisfied with the day’s work and ...”

“... On Hoxton Square, if anyone cares to notice it, is a blue plaque for the local physician, James Parkinson, who identified and described the neurological disease that carries his name. But now, with ever increasing speed, the memory traces of market gardens, madhouses, priories, holy wells, 19th-century radicalism, are being wiped out by the new ...”

“... gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”

“... assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s ...”

“... the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced he was ‘determined that the law shall be respected’ and that anyone aware of illegal CIA activities was obliged to report them. Nixon was finally forced ...”

“... of some of his appointments, especially of ‘internationalists’ such as George H.W. Bush, James Baker and Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger was one of the few figures in the administration to show concern about white extremism. Reagan only made matters worse by allying himself with Jewish neoconservatives, who his far-right critics believed controlled the ...”

“... was born 30 November 1908, third child and second son of Henry Brooke and his wife Mary, née Turner, the youngest of the family by ten years or more. Both his grandfathers had been wine merchants, also his father, who had started life as a solicitor. Brooke’s elder brother, after ten years as a regular officer in the Royal East Kent Regiment, The ...”

“... distortions with Disney’s. I should add that Berger also described Pollock as ‘a little like James Dean’, at least in his penchant for acting dumb. Insofar as he was able to praise Pollock at all, Berger saw his work as a response to ‘the decadence of the culture to which he belongs’, asserting that ‘his talent will only reveal negatively but ...”

“... Baltimore, Tampa Bay). In the National League East, the ghastly Atlanta Braves (once owned by Ted Turner, now part of the AOL Time Warner empire) won their divisional title for a record 12th year in succession. By contrast, the 2003 post-season – the October sequence of play-offs between the best teams from the regular season that culminates in the World ...”

“... conceit’. Had Hulme survived the First World War, he wrote, ‘I should undoubtedly have played Turner to his Ruskin’; but as things transpired, he had to undertake both roles himself.Lewis also fought in the war, ‘an interminable nightmare’, including service at Passchendaele, ‘an epic of mud’. ‘I, figuratively, have never smiled again,’ he ...”

“... article.*More curiously, Christine Borland, one of the artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, has as one part of her exhibition at the Tate Gallery an installation devoted to the Sicilian Dwarf and the Irish Giant. The installation is called After a True Story – Giant and Fairy Tales, and is made up of four pieces, one on each wall. There ...”