“... Orson Welles and W.C. Fields. When, late in life, Bergen became the father of a flesh and blood child called Candice, he whimsically brought her up as Charlie McCarthy’s kid sister. In her impressively restrained autobiography, Knock Wood, Candice Bergen remembered Charlie’s room in the family house in Beverly Hills, with its neat bed, a wardrobe ...”

“... certain curious details retain their vividness (‘Enrique confessing that he would like to have a child. The experience of childbirth, those were his words’); much has been forgotten (‘I think he was writing from Madrid, but I’m not sure any more’); much was never known (why Martín had to travel to Cartagena and Málaga for work); and the tale is ...”

“... teams, especially the New England Patriots. I grew up outside Boston, and spent summers as a child with my grandmother in Rindge, New Hampshire, in the state’s rural south-western corner. I felt more or less, though not necessarily happily, at home in this crowd – as if it were a family gathering of my more aggressive cousins or a high school reunion ...”

“... seems patiently to have accepted as the necessary facilitators of his art. One of them, Cindy Lee, persuaded him in 1965 to run away to Mexico, which was a good place to find mind-enhancing drugs. The trip (in both the geographic and the pharmacological senses) was not a success, and he returned to his wife in a Mallorca which was increasingly a place of ...”

“... the pupils are half-hidden under the eyelids; as if the eyes had stopped between floors. Spike Lee has similar eyes, which I find attractive, maybe because they give a sense of inhabiting worlds other than this; they are, of course, irritating for exactly the same reason.A call from Barry Cryer, who claims to have heard a woman outside Liberty’s saying ...”

“... with absurd trivialities.In my answer, both in Berkeley and Mantua, I talked about how, as a child, I had felt oppressed by the news: by the way the mood in the room shifted when men came on TV, to speak of the great deeds of other men, and by the aura of gravitas that surrounded these deeds, which seemed to annihilate every other aspect of life, the ...”

“... But dark is good. We are conceived and carried in the darkness. When my son was born, a midwinter child, he cried pitifully at the ward’s lights, and settled to sleep only when he was laid in a big pram with a black hood under a black umbrella. Our vocabulary ebbs with the daylight, closes down with the cones of our retinas. I looked up ‘darkness’ on ...”

“... critical call) – rhyme scheme: ‘Mandy’, ‘handy’, ‘dandy’. Waller trills ‘Lalala-lee-lo’ quite sarcastically and scrambles the lyrics with an indescribable gurgling sound. ‘Mandy’ was featured in a new Eddie Cantor movie, Kid Millions, and the recording aimed to capitalise on this. Waller’s scornful attack is thus especially ...”

“... her eyes smiled through gold-rimmed spectacles. Behind her stood a large print of the Virgin and Child. ‘There was an awakening with Anthony,’ she said. ‘He developed into a bit of a monkey and people wanted to be with him. It was just too sad. When I heard Anthony had gone into the army I said, “No!” His whole physique was so thin and I couldn’t ...”

“... Show telling the producer Polly Platt, to whom he’s married and who’s just had their second child, that he’s having an on-set affair with Cybill Shepherd: ‘Peter apologised, claimed he couldn’t help it, that he had never had a cover girl before, that he was in the throes of a sexual obsession.’ A couple of pages later we learn that the ...”

“... Thomas and Katia Mann had six children. It was clear from early on that Katia most loved the second child, Klaus, who was born in 1906, and that Thomas loved Erika, the eldest, born in 1905, and also Elisabeth, born in 1918. The other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919 ...”

“... Titanic, Fred Trump rushed to the casino to buy $3.35 million in chips to buoy his flailing child, who used the money to avoid default by making an interest payment he wouldn’t otherwise have had the liquid reserves to meet. A straight loan would have put Fred Trump in the lengthy queue of creditors. With his loan in the form of chips he could redeem ...”

“... and semen behind his art and life deodorised away. In many ways, Smith is still the teenage Patti Lee, who stuck texts and pics and reproductions on her New Jersey bedroom wall in a crazy-paved collage of British Invasion pop, Catholic symbology and European art: saints and sinners and sexy English singers. She’s a soul collector, still indulging her artsy ...”

“... to power. In 2002, the Bush Administration seemed to think the candidate of the old ruling party, Lee Hoi Chang, had a lock on the next Presidential election; when he came to Washington in the autumn, the Administration treated him like a king. Instead, the Korean people elected Roh Moo Hyun, a courageous lawyer who had defended many dissidents against the ...”

“... through one of the actresses there met and began taking classes with Allan Miller, a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She auditioned for Strasberg’s Actors Studio aged sixteen, and though she didn’t get in they encouraged her to try again later; piqued, she never did. When she left school in January 1960, she had her first role ‘off-off-off-Broadway’.The ...”