“... Williams’s five boys. In April 1994 Maxine had left the family home she shared with her husband David Handley in Newark Knok, and taken the kids to live at the house of her boyfriend Alex Joseph, at Lobelia Close in Beckton. Daniel went to Beckton Cross primary school, and was one of those kids who’d talk to anyone. He already had girlfriends, and was one ...”

“... now meant enjoying a practised familiarity with expensive rare books and manuscripts. Despite David Garrick’s bequest of his impressive collection of Renaissance playbooks to the new British Museum in 1779, this effectively meant that to be a legitimate Shakespearean critic now required the independent means to own a ...”

“... fashion should be judged on the criterion of ‘beauty’. On the contrary, he claims, ‘it means to be dressed correctly.’ He condemns the cult of beauty expressed ‘in the form of velvet collars, aesthetic trouser fabric and Secessionist neckties’. Second, he praises Savile Row fashion as a model of its kind. In true Brummell style, Loos argues ...”

“... feared,’ McCann writes, ‘he was in danger of succumbing to self-parody.’ I see what McCann means in terms of his career, but I would have thought that Cary Grant, the same Cary Grant McCann portrays, made words like ‘self-caricature’ and ‘self-parody’ almost meaningless. Mimicry, and a certain distance from his self, was part of who Cary Grant ...”

“... intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after the war Frank became for many of ...”

“... SIVs. At least some of these cultures also employed chimpanzee sera to nourish the cells, which means there was substantial potential for recombination (the exchange of fragments of DNA) between different SIV strains in vitro. It has also been claimed, for instance by a group of researchers led by Beatrice Hahn, Bette Korber and Paul Sharp, that Aids could ...”

“... the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the ...”

“... learned book, as in much of his other writing, he is the only one in step. Bernard’s title means what it says: this is not a biography. And it is not about Henrician politics in general. Surprisingly, Bernard deals hardly at all with the fall and execution of Anne Boleyn. Some have seen Anne’s active interest in evangelical religious reform, and in ...”

“... involves the contrast between the work published in her lifetime – which seems so aware, as David Kalstone put it, ‘of the smallness and dignity of human observation and contrivance’ – and the pain and disorder of her often very messy life. Born in 1911, Bishop was effectively orphaned as a small child: her father died before she was one; in ...”

“... his book about censorship: not just dishonour but the question whether the term still means anything. It’s important too to see that in spite of the high moral tone of many speakers in these works, Coetzee is staging an argument, not trying to win one or even, finally, to assert one. He uses fiction to think with, and in Elizabeth Costello the ...”

“... wars in less than six decades and still does not have peace agreements with all of its neighbours means that people live with the feeling of constant threat. This feeling, justified or not, has made Israeli decision-makers very cautious in negotiation and loath to change the political status quo, whence, as Weizman shows, the need to reach agreements granting ...”

“... to the flinty Wyeth’s credit, this overture was rebuffed.’ Nearer home, there was the case of David Sylvester, perhaps the leading British art critic of the second half of the 20th century. Hughes valued him as a friend and a fine analyst; he was also the best exhibition installer of his time. But he was a very slow writer with ‘an indurated ...”

“... commemorating the Baader-Meinhof Group (‘The political topicality of my October paintings means almost nothing to me’). And the paintings were executed in 1988, after Richter had read The Baader-Meinhof Complex by Stefan Aust, a book that did much to discredit the theory that Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and other members of the Red Army Faction ...”

“... told him: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job ...”

“... they are still very much of the common people. Stagecoach was the director’s own project. David Selznick wouldn’t take it on as producer because he saw it as ‘just another Western’ with no big stars, and Walter Wanger, the eventual producer, would have wanted Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the leads. But Ford insisted on Claire Trevor and ...”