“... 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 ...”

“... to do given some of the obstacles to satisfaction she faced. Born in Melbourne, Garland was the child of respectable but dull and philistine parents – a well-to-do businessman father, a distant fashion-plate mother, who while ‘sensuously impressive’ was ‘inadequately loving’. Like her contemporary Edith Sitwell, Garland suffered as a ...”

“... One afternoon​ in September last year I took the bus from Leicester to Coalville to visit Lee Knifton. He is a carer with an organisation called Shared Lives Plus, which matches people who need care – people who, thirty years ago, would have been institutionalised – with a caring lay person who has room in their home and their life to take ...”

“... and ‘Love Is Blue’ – grimly laid down as puberty loomed – don’t count.) Pepper was a child prodigy. Though neglected and unloved (his parents split up and basically dumped him) he got hold of a clarinet and taught himself to play. By the age of 14 he was sitting in on clarinet and sax in jazz clubs all around LA. After a short stint in the Army ...”

“... in the semi-authentic antiquarian bookshops groaned as hustlers with bulging golf carts and child buggies lurched in off the street. ‘We’ve got books. Got ‘em all. Cellar’s full. Sorry.’ Book graveyards are all that remains of Greenwich’s punt at culture. The theatre, in want of a few hundred thousand pounds of Lottery money, has been closed ...”

“... crime as an intuitive revolt against racism. But he was also – in Hilton Als’s words – ‘a child of the bourgeoisie in love with the stars in the gutter’, and the gutter nearly swallowed him up. In 1928, he robbed a couple in Cleveland of four rings worth $5000, and was arrested the next day in a pawnshop. The police forced a confession out of him by ...”

“... I have loved mentally, and some physically.’ Two years after their wedding, the Channons’ only child, Paul, was born, but eighteen months later ‘we broke off conjugal relations, never in our case particularly successful.’ By then Honor was increasingly absent on supposed skiing holidays – one of them in July – and Channon eventually realised that ...”

“... dinner in Davos attended by Eric Schmidt from Google; inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee; the boss of Vodafone, Vittori Colao; the former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt; the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman; and Fadi Chehadé, the CEO of the body charged with co-ordinating the internet.’ It’s worth dwelling on this, because the position ...”

“... one member in a partnership with producers, retailers and consumers. The consumer is still the child-sorcerer of market democracy, sweet-toothed and capricious, gaining weight by the meal and ready to throw it about: government can’t quite face off against us. Well, not yet – but there’s a strong hint that in Defra’s thinking ‘choice’ is no ...”