“... cameraman’, but he points out that his first professional job in France was not till 1964 when, by sheer chance, he joined the unit shooting the six-part sketch film, Paris vu par ...The story illustrates once again that there are as many answers to the question ‘how did you get into films’ as there are people working in the movies. He didn’t think of ...”

“... as a figment of Hoxha’s paranoia. The credibility of his accusations was hardly enhanced by the fact that he claimed that Shehu had killed himself after being strongly criticised for arranging the betrothal of his son to a woman whose family allegedly contained ‘six to seven war criminals’, and thus attempting to create a scandal which would ...”

“... oldest universities. Neither phenomenon is new, but that is not all they have in common: both can be regarded as symptoms of madness, which is always making news – this, at any rate, is the diagnosis favoured by Nkosi and Arnold. They discount the talk of journalists and are at pains to show how states of emergency or of ...”

“... behalf of Booker McConnell, announces in a press release that one of five named novelists ‘will be £10,000 richer at 7 p.m. on 23 October’. The other four will have to be content with leatherbound copies of their books; one of the ways in which this competition differs from a golf tournament is that nobody gets ...”

“... the catalogue of the exhibition illustrate the book; there are also some somewhat drab woodcuts by Kurt Craemer. There is a lively introduction by Edgar Johnson. Bulwer’s book first appeared in 1834, when the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum were the object of great interest in this country. The discovery of the ...”

“... But a permanent committee to tell them how they ought to use their own native language would be an institutionalised insult. Setting up an English Academy to watchdog it over the language would have guaranteed defeat or exile for any government or monarch foolish enough to try it on. If we are to believe one of the contributions in this ...”

“... and compelling fiction – flourish in Holland in the 17th century? A simple answer is supplied by John Berger. The world in European realist art is ‘rendered up to the spectator owner’. There is an emphasis on the tactile, and the framed easel picture, conceived of as a window or a mirror, is also like ‘a safe let into the wall, in which the visible ...”

“... death in an air accident …” ’ A good Cassonian ploy. Those who were outside the game would be impressed that he knew who the Times architectural correspondent was; those who knew that evasive figure to be J.M. Richards would be interested to learn where he lived; and those who knew ...”

“... in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, he missed a First in Part II. This was a stroke of luck which, by ruling out a tutorship at Oxford, freed him to pursue his interests in military history as a lecturer at King’s College, London. His first book, a history of the Coldstream Guards written jointly with John Sparrow, was published in 1951. And there you have ...”

“... so that he was spared the inevitable chauvinism of her reaction) every-one expected him to be pro-British or at least divided in his loyalties. Instead he found himself part of a general mood of excitement and belonging, which afterwards people preferred to forget. His general opinion of his country, though, is not flattering: he refers to ‘the ...”

“... is how that Anglocentrism, allegedly located in London and Oxbridge mostly, is supposed to be deeply satisfying to the English themselves. Robert Crawford, who pursues the argument on behalf of the Scots, avoids this mistake, detecting in a provincial Englishman like Tony Harrison a fury and resentment not surpassed ...”

“... for two minutes. From the age of two she was brought up in New York in a series of rented rooms by her mother, Fran Liedloff, after Fran left Janet’s father, Henry Hobhouse, in England. (Bett, the character in The Furies based on Janet’s mother, commits the unforgivable sin of changing the baby’s diapers in the dining-room of her husband’s country ...”

“... This enormous volume – beautifully designed, bound and typeset by its publishers – represents the merest sliver of Mavis Gallant’s lifelong achievement. Even discounting the two novels and the books of essays, what we have here can amount to little more than half the content of her nine published short-story collections ...”

“... small sofa in the Mount Vernon Room at the Westbury, a few feet from a pool of vomit, left behind by a woman accompanying the Australian Ashes team – when so many enthusiasts waited over half a century to set eyes on a stamp which they must have begun to doubt ever existed. The stamp was discovered in 1931 and in that same year vanished. ‘No one in New ...”

“... at the Paris Ritz in September 1993? The truth was that the bill had been paid, via Said Ayas, by Prince Mohammed, heir to the throne of Saudi Arabia. There was nothing especially horrific about this. Aitken’s association with the Saudi monarchy was well known. A couple of nights at the Ritz cost a thousand quid or so – a bagatelle in Aitken’s ...”