“... many suggestions he made that evening was that, when I was in Dublin again, I should go and see Michael Yeats, the son of the poet, who might be glad to meet someone who was interested in his grandfather as much as his father – and to spend time with someone who was brought up, as I was, in a Fianna Fáil family (Fianna Fáil being at the time the main ...”

“... wealth and sexual prowess was marshalled to conquer (read “violate”) the blonde English snow fairy,’ he wrote in al-Ahram Weekly. And in impressive support of his opinion, he cited the 10 August issue of the Sunday Times: Does he [al-Fayed senior] hope that William’s coronation, in however many decades’ time, will have an Alexandrian air due ...”

“... are the few Englishmen in British India who gave aid to nationalists or Communists. One of them, Michael Carritt, has written a light-hearted account of his brief career in the Indian Civil Service.4 At vastly greater risk, a few Frenchmen in Algeria gave aid secretly to the rebels. Admirable too, though unlikely to be admired by Tories or Reaganites, is the ...”

“... spectral landscape. The Mariner’s journey to the edge of the Antarctic, a land of ‘mist and snow’ where ‘ice, mast-high, came floating by,/As green as emerald,’ finds several echoes in Encounters at the End of the World (2007), his Oscar-nominated documentary about the ‘dreamers and scientists’ employed at the US Antarctic Programme’s ...”

“... artist Jan Sanders van Hemessen of a dark-featured Tarquin with curly black hair grabbing a snow-white Lucrece. Opposite is an image by Artemisia Gentileschi (c.1650) of a black slave looking on while Tarquin attacks Lucrece with a dagger. Did early readers assume, when Tarquin threatens to kill Lucrece and place a murdered slave next to her, as though ...”

“... account we can offer of it. ‘Something always escapes,’ James says. In MacNeice’s poem ‘Snow’:World is crazier and more of it than we think,Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portionA tangerine and spit the pips and feelThe drunkenness of things being various.James says that philosophy, as generally understood, begins with the urge ‘to correct that ...”

“... we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills. The cab is old and draughty, it’s beginning to snow and as we drive through this landscape of lost villages and frostbitten fields it gets more and more foggy and like a journey out of Le Grand Meaulnes. It’s all of an hour before we reach the church and everyone has gone in, the undertakers with a ...”

“... in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... knew the name Sheila – which had an easy diminutive, Shaylochka – because they had read C.P. Snow.) It was impossible to live in the Soviet Union as a foreigner and not become obsessed with spying. (If anyone doubts this, read Michael Frayn’s wonderful novel The Russian Interpreter, published the year I first went to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... marker of power, and he deals in the sort of belligerent, accusatory, semi-comedic liberalism that Michael Moore has turned into a cult that nets hundreds of millions of dollars.2 Delegates at the Convention were much keener to meet Moore than they were to meet Howard Dean, who had led the field among the candidates for the nomination until he found himself ...”

“... Province in China. Schaller’s principles and practices inspired Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. He is a big-game biologist, a student of spectacular individuals in nature rather than a toiler at the overlooked and the unindividuated: ‘An animal must provide an emotional experience if I am to involve myself in its world for years.’ Yet ...”

“... the 1920s, about a hundred years too late. Now and then, or was it once, she went skittering over snow and ice in a cold place called Chamonix, definitely near London. Yet in the unfolding of this family origin myth, with its puzzles and enigmas, my own provenance and Maureen’s background were endowed with a fantastic, deceptive clarity. Adoption was the ...”

“... great British stability, and infused by a changing but always recognisable British identity. When Michael Powell in A Canterbury Tale had shown a hawk rising from a pilgrim’s hand and turning into a Spitfire, it had seemed natural. When English Electric developed the RAF’s new jet interceptor, the Lightning – tested by Roly Beamont – it had seemed to ...”

“... Isadora Duncan, Alla Nazimova, Pola Negri, Tamara Karsavina, Katharine Cornell, Marie Laurencin, Michael Strange and Eva Le Gallienne in the 1920s and 1930s to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hope Williams, Libby Holman, Ona Munson (Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind), Poppy Kirk (a Schiaparelli model and prominent diplomat’s wife) and many others in ...”