“... version, dissident theories have proliferated. One of the more baroque was advanced by George C. Thomson, a swimming-pool engineer from Glendale, California, who argued that five people were killed in Dealey Plaza by the 22 shots fired there (but not Kennedy, who was impersonated in the presidential limousine by Officer Tippit, the Dallas policeman ...”

“... Lewis attended segregated schools then the American Baptist Theological Seminary; Bond went to the George School, a virtually all-white Quaker prep school in Pennsylvania, before returning to the South to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta. Lewis, for all his accomplishments, was shy and devoid of glamour; his speeches were impassioned, but as a public ...”

“... days of his success, his black-faced, mammy-singing disciples included not only Eddie Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker, but the future movie mogul Harry Cohn, the young Walter Winchell and his own older brother. Signed by the Shubert Brothers in 1911, Jolson was the first product of the bastard ...”

“... of each other, and observers of his early work often say that she brought out the best in him. Andrew Sarris has noticed the particular delicacy of the scene in The Shop around the Corner where she reads the letter from her anonymous correspondent, and Stewart, its author, watches and waits, yearning to tell the truth but playing as ever by the rules. It ...”

“... scratch round-up of whoever’s available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing too as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely ...”

“... it on television could have been surprised when, at the climax of his speech, the President told George Bush to ‘go out and win one for the Gipper.’ In Knute Rockne, All American, Reagan played the legendary Notre Dame halfback, George Gipp, who died young of viral pneumonia but lived on as an inspiration to his ...”

“... in strange fantasies to sustain the impression of intimacy with Austen that the novels create. George Saintsbury, who coined the term ‘Janeite’ in 1894, made a point of his readiness ‘to live with and to marry’ Elizabeth Bennet and serve as ‘a knight (or at least a squire) of the order of St Jane’. In 1949, after writing two books about ...”

“... who became his mentor. He was also introduced to Caribbean intellectuals including Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and Sam Selvon.With Selvon’s encouragement, Johnson abandoned his attempts to write poetry in standard English and began experimenting with Jamaican Creole. His Goldsmiths dissertation on the sociology of reggae lyrics was important too. ‘I ...”

“... of paying people to scrap their cars, we might as well burn ten-pound notes in power stations,’ George Monbiot told the BBC. Some of the firms the incentive scheme is intended to help have been afraid the move would leave them out of pocket. Honda, Ford and Vauxhall have been reluctant to take part. But however doubtful industry experts have been, 35,000 ...”

“... the aid of a magnifying glass. These writings ‘give one the idea’, she told her publisher George Smith, ‘of creative power carried to the verge of insanity’. The Brontë children’s juvenilia began as a series of plays for performance, but soon developed into rival literary enterprises, each involving a complex apparatus of ...”

“... Tom Arnold made friends with Alfred Domett, Browning’s ‘Waring’, and with F.A. Weld and Andrew Clarke, both subsequently important as Singapore proconsuls at the time of British expansion into the Malayan peninsula. His conversion to Catholicism in 1855, and his enforced resignation as Tasmania’s inspector of schools, brought him back to Britain ...”

“... There has recently been the quarrel between Nabokov’s biographers – the publishing rascal Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric records? Did Lawrence Durrell commit incest with his daughter, and if he did should the public know about it? The reluctance of his estate ...”

“... but was nevertheless a team effort. They were both furious. Diana’s response was to talk to Andrew Morton, whose book, Diana, Her True Story, came out the following year and marked the beginning of the public War of the Waleses. Junor has known her present subject since 1987, when her first biography of Charles resulted in a writ from ...”

“... unveiled in 1996 by the parliamentary under-secretary of state for Wales, and commemorating George Borrow’s enjoyment of what he described as ‘one of the wildest and most beautiful scenes imaginable’, seems a very bad joke indeed. This view is surely as much part of the heritage of Wales as the transplanted woundwort, and it is impossible to ...”

“... in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police devoted far more resources than to the ...”