“... originate with him but had been a staple of Broadway folderol since the brothers Willie and Eugene Howard imported it from vaudeville into a series of George White’s Scandals, one of the most popular American revues of the 1920s and 1930s.In recounting the way the TV shows were put together, Margolick is clear, sometimes even vivid. But he’s confused about ...”

“... The​ teenager was born, it’s sometimes said, in America in the mid-1950s, when Little Richard released ‘Tutti Frutti’ and Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Thirty years later, the Thatcher government made a less exuberant contribution to the way the transition to adulthood is imagined. A new type of policy problem had come to light in the form of the working-age youth who was not in work, education or training, and risked getting stuck in that situation ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”

“... Law (1997); and Fox Nation v. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault on Truth by Mark Howard. I toss these books together to indicate how this digital age, which prides itself on its abundance and freedom of information, has become so uneasy about the pervasiveness of lying. We might add to these indictments three of Oborne’s earlier ...”

“... turreted instance of what Pevsner calls the ‘Loire style’. It was built for Richard D’Oyly Carte in the late 1880s and its interior was a vision of marble and velvet. Conceived as a full-blown opera house, it was a commercial failure and its successful reinvention as the Palace Theatre of Varieties, an upmarket music hall, reflected ...”

“... to bring countries together than any number of EU directives.’ He quotes another political hero, Richard Cobden, the Manchester textile manufacturer and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, who described free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’, not bothering to notice that in the case of the redundant cotton weavers of Bengal, the casualties of cheap Lancashire cloth, God ...”

“... have disliked anyone holding power. The episode of 1521, when Wolsey is alleged to have packed Richard Pace off to Rome, has been misunderstood, for Pace was glad to go on his embassy, and his subsequent breakdown, normally blamed on the cardinal’s ruthlessness, merely shows how unreliable are the charges Pace brought against him. The Duke of Norfolk ...”

“... was also the first ‘public war’, covered by correspondents and shot by photographers. William Howard Russell’s reports in the Times told the public the truth about the war, to the rage of the generals. This ‘vulgar low Irishman’, who ‘drinks anyone’s brandy and water, and smokes as many cigars as foolish young officers will let him’, was ...”

“... a dilettante and in the doldrums about cracking the code of American musical success, Porter told Richard Rodgers: ‘I’ll write Jewish tunes.’ In Porter’s shift to the heavily chromatic minor key with its unmistakable Mediterranean flavour, he found a rhythmic correlative which engineered the crossover to Broadway. ‘It is surely one of the ironies of ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... The ‘raft of laws’ of which he now disapproves seems to have emanated exclusively from Michael Howard, when the Government was already on its last legs. Alexander’s book is a compelling account of what the powerful in our society now mean by democracy; his is the authentic voice of post-democratic liberalism and his version of democracy both mirrors and ...”

“... Gable’ for their tours on the Dark Continent. The person I’d prefer to look like is Trevor Howard, the epitome of Mr Sensible, even with his kneecaps bared, but I’ve a feeling W&G can stretch to this. They’ll also be able to sort me out with a pair of ‘strong shoes for walking’ – trainers, says the guide, or desert boots, although I’ll be ...”

“... us, makes American dreams come true without entailing corresponding responsibilities. Because Richard Nixon needed to issue orders, a ‘smoking gun’ tied him to Watergate. The question Senator Howard Baker had asked, ‘What did the President know and when did he know it,’ which Baker hoped would exculpate ...”

“... seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his love of Howard Hawks, perhaps the perfect no-brow. The clue to Hawks’s greatness is that this sombre lining is cut against the cloth of the genre in which he is operating. Far from the meek purveyor of Hollywood forms, he always chose to turn them upside down. To Have ...”

“... to all the greats and also the less than greats’. He spoke about his original canon – Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Bresson, Rossellini – but also about recent films such as Alien: Resurrection (‘inventive, honest and frank’) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (‘I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot’).At some point I wrote a ...”