“... 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 ...”

“... slow swing replaced by a nocturne. The station cut in again with a learned authority, ‘Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer’, direct from the Princeton observatory to explain the discharge and point out that Mars could not support intelligent life. Pierson, however, confessed that he could not explain the regularity of the emissions. More ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... with an even hand, it came to the only realistic decision that a competent lawyer could come to. Howard Youngerwood, the Assistant Chief Prosecutor responsible for the Lawrence prosecution, was harassed by the public at the Lawrence Inquiry before he out-victimed them in describing his own experience as a Jew of racism in this country. He also received ...”

“... hidden’ for almost seventy years. Tawadros was said to have sold the stele just a decade after Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, and just eight years after he revealed the gold funerary mask. These were global events. Audiences in both Cairo and London were enthralled by the excavation. The Times managed to secure an exclusive deal for press ...”

“... Twomblys, accidental Jackson Pollocks, accidental works by Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois or Richard Tuttle or Jean-Michel Basquiat. (See recent coup to the right: an accidental Philip Guston. Guston’s 1968 painting Boot is above, and below a CE artist’s picture, now in my collection, of an eight-fingered glove.) At such moments, you not only feel ...”

“... repented either of these activities. Still, he too was a bookman. In a tiny herbal that Charles Howard inscribed to John Winthrop Jr, Wait added a note recalling that the gift had been given in London in or around 1662, enhancing its associations.Gigante has discovered as many fans of Lamb among Boston antiquarians as there were in New York. Bostonians ...”

“... could be the difference between being a statistic in a Channel 4 filler and being reincarnated by Richard Burton. Only losers leave their stories to the East London Advertiser and the more literate class of probation officer. Take that McVicar. He was totally out of order. An armed robber, ‘one of the top men of his profession’ (Lambrianou), he blew all ...”

“... in Early Modern Europe’ is a critique of Michel Foucault. An interesting article by Howard Nenner on 1688 criticises the view that Whigs and Tories were agreed in using the occasion to impose conditions on William III: rather, he argues, the Convention Parliament was hamstrung by collective uneasiness about what could be done constitutionally in ...”

“... in the Tory Party’s many leadership contests, in every case supporting men (Hague, IDS, Howard) who had been thoroughly sprayed with Eurosceptic voter-repellent. The profits from the Telegraph funded the expansion of Black’s empire: he tried to buy his way into the Australian newspaper market, bought the Chicago Sun-Times, and founded a new paper ...”

“... leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of them voted in favour of a no confidence motion in Corbyn, and only forty against. (He ...”

“... by its roots.’ A blown rose in her pocket, and the marriage somehow mended. Two weeks later Howard Moss at the New Yorker would take ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’ and ‘Nocturne’ for the magazine. Plath sets the date aside in stars. They probably killed a few too many animals together. Another scene drew them close, in the aftermath of this ...”

“... recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks in Patriots, the convoy ‘got a muted reception when it parked in the ruins of Berlin’. In France, the bus crews were treated to mayoral banquets, only for their leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to ...”

“... apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut down the Office of Science and Technology, and kicked the presidential science adviser out of the cabinet – an ...”