“... film, Wild at Heart. He cast Laura Dern as a ‘gum-chewing Marilyn’ who takes to the road in a Ford Thunderbird with an Elvis-impersonating Nicolas Cage, and, at the end of the film, once they’ve trawled the many horrors of Americana, Sheryl Lee appears as Glinda. Total kitsch, you might say, or ‘abject’, as Godard – the only Frenchman who didn’t ...”

“... Hamlet’ has a more absolute meaning. In an early allusion, the writer of an elegy for Richard Burbage after his death in 1619 names his great roles as     young Hamlett, ould Hieronymoe, Kind Leer, the Greved More – where Hamlet is young as Lear is kind and the Moor grieved. The phrase, which may have been regular in use, gives a valuable ...”

“... see, if only we had looked. Two who drew the inevitable conclusions were the incoming President, Richard Nixon, elected on a promise of ‘peace with honour’ reminiscent of Mendès-France, and his devious National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. Both had impeccable anti-Communist credentials, both had travelled widely (Nixon as Pepsi-Cola’s ...”

“... the German nation . . . Many fine babies were begotten and born in this house.’ He interviewed Richard Strauss for the army magazine Stars and Stripes and listened to him praising Hans Frank, who ran Auschwitz, since Frank, unlike Hitler, ‘really appreciated my music’. He met Heinrich’s first wife, who had been released from Terezín, and her ...”

“... the pleadings of Alsop to Mac Bundy did succeed in getting the latter to release a huge tranche of Ford Foundation money to endow Wolfson College, Oxford, the foundation of which was Berlin’s noblest enterprise. So perhaps he was on to something when he expatiated about ethical ‘trade-offs’ between contrasting or alternative positions: the one ...”

“... under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a ...”