“... hysteria gripping Hollywood, he met Nancy Davis. She was a Chicago socialite and graduate of Smith College who had come to Hollywood in search of stardom but also – more important – a husband. Falsely accused of communist sympathies, she sought exoneration from SAG and took a shine to its president. He was attractive and charming and had a ...”

“... honourable mention in the entry on Detective Fiction. Luce Irigaray is in, but not Cecil Woodham Smith. The biggest vacancy in the Companion is where contemporary best-selling fiction ought to be. The absence is so noticeable, that one turns for explanation to the preface. There it is stated that ‘our selection gives preference to women whose works reflect ...”

“... is just not an ordinary man,’ Cleo later explained. Frustrated Hollywood screenwriters – as Richard Corliss points out in his excellent study, Talking Pictures (1975) – expressed much of their creativity in ephemeral forms: angry memos, practical jokes, one-liners, gossip and bitching at the writers’ tables. Additional Dialogue (Trumbo’s letters ...”

“... readers? A few scholars have solved this difficulty by adopting a narrow geographical format. Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991), for example, is a brilliant history of how the French, British and American empires interacted both with each other and with native Indians over two centuries in the Great Lakes region of North America. But what if one ...”

“... almost ineradicable. Bale’s previous book, The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, like Richard Hayton’s Reconstructing Conservatism?, attempted to explain how the party lost its way for so long, and then, eventually, found a path back into office, though not to single-party government. As late as the Tory semi-recovery of 2005, Bale notes, the ...”

“... on they’ll be hard to stop. The Tate’s is the kind of show that sets one generalising. Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, wrote that it had managed ‘to take a non-subject (Picasso’s impact here was limited to a handful of artists) and turn it into a gripping indictment of British culture in the first half of the 20th ...”

“... like Yayoi Kusama and Lee Bontecou; and others were rarely seen at all, such as Romare Bearden, Richard Hamilton and R.B. Kitaj in the Pop gallery, and Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica in the Minimalist and Post-Minimalist rooms. Some practices are still not an easy fit: an alcove of Conceptual and institution-critical work by Robert ...”

“... trustees would not countenance an agnostic headmaster. Mary Ward intervened. Her publisher, George Smith, enriched by Elsmere and its successors, was the proprietor of the Cornhill Magazine. Thanks to Mrs Ward’s influence, Leonard was taken on in 1901. He would eventually become editor.Released from her matron’s duties at Charterhouse, Julia took out a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... which would give participants ‘a chance to experience the disciplines of collective choice’. Richard Holme points out that this in turn will involve major constitutional and political changes: above all, enormously enhancing our access to information while simultaneously circumscribing the capacity of the state to behave secretively and ...”

“... he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham contemporaries Walter Allen and Reggie Smith – by a young lecturer in the Classics Department, Louis MacNeice. Reed had a remarkable speaking voice and a gift for mimicry (and for assuming the accents of a class not his own), and as an undergraduate he acted in and produced plays, which may have led ...”

“... of the drug traffic; a century and a half ago, a card-carrying progressive would have sworn, as Richard Cobden did, by phrenology. When invited to lend our ears to what is obvious to all men of good will, phrenology should always come to mind. At an individual level, today’s Lib Dems are hardly rooted in the great continuities of history. A 1992 survey of ...”

“... Coleridge. Eugen Oswald translated Humboldt into English and became tutor to the children of both Richard Cobden and Edward VII. Eleanor Marx translated Flaubert and Ibsen. Johannes Ronge introduced Froebel’s kindergarten ideas to England and Malwida von Meysenburg became a pioneer of women’s education, joining forces with Barbara Leigh ...”

“... from her as Dugdale’s were from him, but as close as Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were to Richard Nixon. The ‘misunderstandings’ over Westlands were attributed to those civil servants such as Mr Bernard Ingham and Mr Charles Powell whom Mrs Thatcher sees many times each day. Isn’t this something we should be concerned about? Three decades after ...”