“... June Allyson as Jo, Janet Leigh as Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Peter Lawford played a glamorous Laurie – indeed, the screenplay describes Laurie as looking ‘not unlike our idea of Edgar Allan Poe’. Armstrong’s Little Women is the most British and Pickwickian of the movie versions, set in a vague 19th-century ...”

“... the City to seek out millionaires to conduct the Government’s business: David Simon from BP, Martin Taylor from Barclays Bank, Peter Davis from the Pru, even that devoted Thatcherite Alan Sugar of Tottenham Hotspur. Past Labour Governments had made some small effort to assert their democratic rights over unelected ...”

“... one solution to the crisis that engulfed the Western Church after its mishandling of the case of Martin Luther. Behind this deliberate imitation of the Spanish Inquisition placed firmly under the control of the papacy was a Neapolitan nobleman and career cleric, Gian Pietro Carafa. He became the nemesis of the Valdesian movement, and anyone whom he suspected ...”

“... were at a loss. I had never been anywhere that felt so solid and so empty. The band’s producer, Martin Hannett, drew on Joy Division’s centrifugal tendency and pushed the band’s music into arrangements that were broken down, unproductive and full of disused space. It was the sound of their city but it could have been describing the entire country. The ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... where he found a new type of analyst who advised him to do exactly what he wanted. He met Peter Orlovsky and they exchanged lovers’ eternal vows. He gave up his girlfriend and his job, started taking heavier doses of Peyote and began to trust the messianic stirrings in his soul. ‘The only poetic tradition is the voice out of the burning bush. The ...”

“... questionable practices, such as ‘soft commissions’ to brokers (i.e. kickbacks), that have led Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican senator from Illinois, to describe the savings industry as ‘the world’s largest skimming organisation’. Pension boards should also carry out their own research, something commercial fund managers too often leave to ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”

“... New Testament, beaming from a candle on a candle-stick round whose column cluster St Paul and St Peter, and whose base is supported by the symbols of the Evangelists. Groping their purblind way from the light, their backs turned to it, towards a pit, is a group of scholars and dignitaries, chiefly churchmen, headed by the Pope. Aristotle, the ...”

“... judge by this account, that Weekend World was creating its own network of clever, ambitious men. Peter Jay, Peter Mandelson, Christopher Hitchens, Brian Walden and their slightly geeky colleagues turned out to be a more influential and politically adept group than Panorama’s fist-fighting war reporters. And none was more ...”

“... real world and an ideal alternative. Both Jack Zipes’s The Wounded Storyteller and Peter Wortsman’s ‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny include translations of ‘The Sandman’, Hoffmann’s most famous text. ‘The Sandman’, the ur-text on the Doppelgänger, has been the object of a dizzying number of readings, among them ...”

“... with power divided between controllers, strand editors and regional department heads. Troy Kennedy Martin’s 1985 anti-nuclear six-parter Edge of Darkness was commissioned by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the ...”

“... and style to New Times (1989), a product of Marxism Today. Indeed, Marxism Today’s editor, Martin Jacques, is a contributor to The Alternative. Both see the Eighties as representing a profound historical caesura: an epoch dominated by the October Revolution, classical social-democratic working-class movements, and a Keynesian-Beveridge political ...”

“... and who clude that rape victims, more often than not, ‘ask for it’. It is 12 years since Martin Short and two co-authors wrote the Penguin Special The Fall of Scotland Yard, a devastating indictment of corruption in the higher echelons of the biggest Police Force in the country. There is little in this book to suggest that there has been any ...”

“... and log every instance, all the way from D.H. Lawrence and Anna Wickham through John Betjeman to Martin Amis, of one single placename’s use to connote a vast tundra of anodyne, apathetic anonymity. Here, though, Croydon is exactly where you’d expect Lodge to make his couple come from: a prompt for often disappointingly chummy humour at the expense of ...”