“... been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 August, Oxford. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter ...”

“... to be recommended some work on American politics, but Brogan always suggested the memoirs of Saint-Simon. Roosevelt ran a court, and the danger of a court is that the ego of the monarch will be inflated by the adulation of those who surround him. More recently, the White House has become a thieves’ kitchen of intrigue and faction. It was not simply that ...”

“... Playing with Fire, the following year, seven weeks after the birth of their second child, Jayden James. By then the marriage had fallen apart, with Britney spiralling into anxiety and depression while Federline was away from home. He claims in his memoir that Britney took cocaine at his album release party, prompting him to file for custody of the boys. Set ...”

“... in Proust. Sex? A Dance gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human ...”

“... It was as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V.S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household. Jorge Luis Borges was ...”

“... of it being a first night as that the cast have been doing it on and off now for two years. When James C. drops his head on his desk it’s with an almighty crash and he gets up looking a bit pale, but there are no other slip-ups. The response at the end is tumultuous, the audience (though I think this is nowadays obligatory) rising to their feet en ...”

“... a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through Saint-Simon and La Rochefoucauld to Chateaubriand (there is, for instance, scarcely a Proustian maxim that one can read without hearing the tone and rhythm of the I7th-century moralistes). This sense of the text gaining sustenance from the rich soil of the French ...”

“... with a discussion of Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s film from 2006, adapted from a P.D. James novel, set in a near-future Britain of caged refugees and cheap euthanasia, a world in which no children have been born for a generation. As Fisher says, this dystopia extrapolates only a little: I watched the film myself the other day to check I’d ...”

“... intimate occasions of which this is not true.)’ In the jacket photograph she was decked out as James Joyce, with a felt-tip monocle over one eye. ‘The picture of you on the back rather turns my head,’ Murdoch wrote. ‘You dazzling creature.’ (Years later, she tried a new tack: ‘I am not a great writer. Neither are you.’)After Brophy’s first ...”

“... are the impracticalities of pure feeling, of idealism, which at first are embodied by brother Simon, on whom ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays for many years had an influence we were not in a position to afford.’ Even the eagle in Mexico conforms to the pattern – by turning out, after all, to be less than one hundred per cent ruthless; ‘well, it was hard ...”

“... the next stage of enlightenment in this set designer’s attempt at a Tibetan lamasery out of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. A copy of Hilton’s 1933 romance, newly printed in Singapore, cased in a leather binder, is left beside every kingsize bed. Tombstone picture books furnish the ledges of the reception area: Theme ...”

“... start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first heard her sing, she said: ‘I’m never going to open my mouth again.’ Frank Sinatra offered to set his goons on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her ...”

“... Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody ...”

“... romance outside their own class, among soldiers and working men, often paying for it. The writer James Pope-Hennessy, living in Ladbroke Grove with a former paratrooper called Lenny, loved inviting cabbies back to the flat and asking them what they did in bed: ‘how I adore getting a total stranger to speak freely about sex.’ When he gets out around the ...”

“... In the spring of 1930, 16 years into his service in the Chinese Maritime Customs, my father, James Anderson, was posted to Hong Kong. He remained there two years, technically posted to Kowloon, but living on the Peak. He disliked the place. The setting might be ‘carelessly beautiful’, but the society was dreary and the town repellent. ‘It is ...”