“... film is set in the early 20th century on a farm in the Texas Panhandle. Abby and her lover, Bill (Richard Gere), are migrant workers who arrive on the train together with Linda, his little sister; because people will talk, Abby passes as his sister too, and the farmer feels free to court her. Having overheard a doctor say that the farmer hasn’t long to live ...”

“... years. But China was now ‘Red China’, and the government needed experts. In the late 1950s the Ford Foundation provided funds for a committee to promote scholarship on the country. A few years later, the CIA provided a subvention for the publication of the China Quarterly, still the pre-eminent journal in the field. Its inaugural issue featured a debate ...”

“... me try now to apply them in the British context. Consider first the case of the Crossman Diaries. Richard Crossman kept the diaries while a member of the Cabinet, as his colleagues were aware. After his death they were edited, a first volume was prepared for publication and serialisation began in the Sunday Times. The Crown brought a civil proceeding to ...”

“... up came a warning from Robert Bork against the menace of the ‘clerisy of power’ now (under the Ford Presidency) steering the nation towards the shoals of equality and uniformity. The following bumper issue of the National Review, on 5 December, was mainly taken up with the text of Oakeshott’s lecture, accompanied by ‘a pictorial essay’ on the banquet ...”

“... 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 ...”