“... he did’, whereas Louis B. Mayer wants to see ‘the good, wholesome, American mother in the home’ (that second comma registering how ‘American’ is to ring out against everything ‘un-American’). There had been a precedent for Eisenstein’s 1930 fiasco with Dreiser in Erich Von Stroheim’s with McTeague by Frank Norris, made into the ten hours ...”

“... now as they were then; they include a smaller number in which the rhythm drives the words home in a masterly fashion. It was these which first established MacDiarmid in my mind as one of the few contemporary poets who really mattered to me. Even so, it was evident that much the best poem in the volume was the ‘Second Hymn’ itself, and in that poem ...”

“... internationalist, addicted to thirty-mile walks in his oldest tweeds, he might have been more at home with Rory Stewart, but there’s possibly a bit of Buchan’s vision in the Black Stone of Brexit, and a bit of Hannay in Johnson’s swagger. It can’t only be down to Hitchcock that The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been ...”

“... life: handsome, personalised spaces. They were not private in a 21st-century sense. As Alan Stewart showed long ago, rulers and patricians often shared them with their secretaries, with whom they planned invasions, plotted love affairs and sometimes talked about books. In Urbino and elsewhere, study walls were covered with intarsia panels, in which ...”

“... could be formed other than of particular folks. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs brings home the way in which tradition and the individual talent can converge in that astonishing thing, a well-nigh instant authentic tradition. ‘It is a reflection of the proverb’s vitality that new ones are continually being created’; on the other hand (a ...”

“... seven others whose names have largely disappeared from literary history: Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, John Kendrick Bangs, Edith Wyatt, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown and Henry Van Dyke (‘the friend of the family’). Apart from arranging for the girl to have met her fiancé at college, so that the gentleman in question remains a ...”

“... used to sign off with the phrase ‘Hearty Cheerios!’ The name was also given to Norman Baillie-Stewart, a Scot who had been imprisoned in the Tower in 1933 for selling military secrets to the Germans, and was one of the first Britons to join the English language service in Berlin. Barrington described his creation as speaking ‘English of the ...”

“... sisters in Christ,’ he shouted, ‘here is a great book that tells the Truth about Ulster. Go home, friend, and read it.’ The book was The Narrow Ground by A.T.Q. Stewart: did the book inspire Paisley, or did the voice of Old Ravenhill inspire The Narrow Ground? Accompanying this question is the problem of the ...”

“... G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue. She left her home, I think, with another man – and left her two young daughters. The episode was brief and disastrous – the other man left her in turn, and the husband took her back.’ James then went on to outline the details, as told to him by Lady Gregory, of the ...”

“... a solution: they offer a welcome straitjacket. Your car will get all the credit for bringing you home to yourself, for showing you the only person you can truly depend on is not merely yourself, but yourself-in-your-car, a somatic unity. Those who spend most of their lives being alert to the demands of others – and that’s most employees, most ...”

“... Rosenthal. His source material was a series of interviews Newman recorded with the screenwriter Stewart Stern between 1986 and 1991, along with ‘oral histories’ of Newman by his contemporaries. In her foreword, Newman’s daughter Melissa says he wanted to create ‘an offering to the offspring’ as well as to set the record straight after decades of ...”

“... drop-outs either. Not quite the Mods next door, they’re the modernists you might take home to mother: both deeply ordinary, and something entirely new.Later in the decade, Lennon and McCartney would both visit the wilder shores of avant-garde art/pol, though it was the Rolling Stones who summoned Dionysus and Pan, with their none hipper ...”

“... that caps the main moral drama of the novel. The subject of one of his reports is an initially Rod Stewart-esque entertainer whom Deza calls ‘Dickie Dearlove’ to protect his identity (even, and illogically, after Dearlove’s plunge into crime has been well publicised by the Sun and the Times and even El País) and also, presumably, to burlesque the ...”

“... US’s Cold War interests. The former CIA agent Miles Copeland – father of the Police drummer, Stewart Copeland – was employed by Booz Allen fresh after instigating coups in Syria and Iran. In 1953, he was sent to Egypt on assignment from both his former and current employers. His Booz Allen consulting work involved tracing the complex holdings of the ...”

“... French verse – as one would expect from a poet in a court where the reigning favourite was Esmé Stewart, James’s French cousin. Technically, he was thoroughly competent and inventive, with a fondness for complicated and often pleasing stanzaic forms. But one is inclined to feel, after a time, that there is a surfeit of foreign kickshaws (though his ...”