“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”

“... to begin looking at the Daily Telegraph, which was owned by the Berry family and presided over by Michael Berry, now Lord Hartwell. Hartwell was 75, a serious and decent man presiding over a newspaper that had in many respects gone to sleep and which was suffering chronic problems with the print unions. I was told by a man who’d worked for the Telegraph in ...”

“... at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite imposing, with the box-office generally at the ...”

“... dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott ...”

“... through the advantages of ‘torture-lite’ in a cover story. In the New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff, biographer of Isaiah Berlin and professor of human rights, exhorted Americans to embrace their imperial destiny and offered his own suggestions for ‘permissible duress’. Even the New Yorker, fastidiously aloof from Beltway schemers during ...”

“... Earl Miner ‘his greatest comedy and one of the greatest comedies in English’. More recently, Howard Erskine-Hill, pursuing a political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of ...”

“... Chaucer that chose a different path again. The leisurely capaciousness of a Gesamtkunstwerk like Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings’s recent Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, able to work its way through a mass of letters, reminiscences and anecdotes, is simply impossible without a great weight of material.3 Fiction is a ...”

“... an earlier generation, since overtaken by Bacon and Freud. Craxton still sits with John Minton, Michael Ayrton, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash as a Neo-Romantic painter, part of the postwar reawakening of the national landscape tradition of Blake and Palmer. In 1987 an influential exhibition at the Barbican, A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in ...”

“... James: A Biography (1980); Ruth Bernard Yeazell in The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981); Howard Feinstein in Becoming William James (1984); Gerald Myers in William James: His Life and Thought (1986); Jane Maher in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James (1986); ...”

“... BROOKS.’ Over the years, the rowdy writers’ room also included Simon, Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Michael Stewart, Joseph Stein and Woody Allen. Tolkin, who was head writer on all Caesar’s shows in the 1950s, said that ‘no other comedian needed material to open his mouth as much as he did, being an uneducated lout.’The writers’ room was a storytelling ...”

“... attract or offend which particular audience. And ultimately there was no choice. An original like Howard Hawks could defy the odds with Scarface and His Girl Friday, but a personal ‘signature’, too, becomes a formula in the end, and Red River gives way to Rio Bravo and Rio Lobo. To step seriously out of the groove of the big studios condemned a director ...”

“... minorities – no Jews, no Poles, no Italians – and had nominated only one other, the hapless Michael Dukakis. But this was the response of a baby boomer, when in fact one of the remarkable things about the Obama campaign was that it wasn’t about race at all. Obama, though he studiously copied his speaking style from King and other preachers, was not ...”

“... next obsession. Thomas was the cad to end all cads, the cadger to end all cadgers. No Trevor Howard, he might at a pinch have been played by Oliver Reed. Margaret Taylor became a patron to the Thomases, her money readily given, and Alan’s reluctantly, binding them all together in a web of mutual resentment. It brought out Alan’s hatred of ...”

“... unprincipled tactics were understood and endorsed by other accused Hollywood writers such as John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo. He left for Europe the next day. The papers from the International Brecht Society’s 1976 conference, published as Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice, are mainly by American and West German critics; they ...”

“... the literary agent, who is the dedicatee of Duffy. Harder to crack is the pseudonymous code of Michael Crichton, the omnicompetent ‘movelist’. (He is author of The Andromeda Strain, director and producer of Coma, director and scriptwriter of Westworld.) Crichton stands six feet seven inches tall. Two of his writing pseudonyms are ‘John Lange’ and ...”