“... This was easily promotable as a great American war movie. It came from a novel by James Jones, who had written From Here to Eternity; it focused on the taking of a hill in the Guadalcanal campaign; and it was crowded with regular soldiers depicted by big Hollywood names – Malick’s legend had grown such that the stars were eager to work for ...”

“... In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t healthy ...”

“... bad it looked on the surface, it was even worse behind the scenes. The long-standing Trump-watcher Michael Wolff, who positioned himself as tittle-tattle-in-chief during those years, wrote a series of books – Fire and Fury, Siege, Landslide – describing the endless tantrums, dressings down and sulks that took place inside the Oval Office. No one was safe ...”

“... is American schoolkids downloading the Starr report and Penthouse’s free photo-set of ‘Paula Jones – Nude!’ for their civics classes. The press were no exception: they, too, got the computer revolution all wrong. Over the last three years leading British and American newspapers (Times, Telegraph, LA Times) have invested heavily in ‘electronic ...”

“... Gonzaga – was chaste. This very important poem was discussed with great subtlety by Roger Jones in a scholarly article in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes for 1981 – an article which Lightbown uses and then dismisses. According to Lightbown, it is important to interpret ‘the individual figures and symbols of a picture like the ...”

“... Diana’s social authority depended on political powerlessness. As Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, argued of George V (and the argument holds for Diana), once the monarch becomes divorced from the discharge of political power, once government ‘decomposes’ into two persons, one ‘untouchable, irremovable and sacrosanct’ (the king), and the other ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... end of the three-day Irish Episcopal Conference last March, by the bishop of Elphin, Christopher Jones, a member of the Bishops’ Liaison Committee for Child Protection, who accused the media of being ‘unfair and unjust’: ‘Could I just say with all this emphasis on cover-up, the cover-up has gone on for centuries, not just in the Church … It’s ...”

“... impulses of their enemies. ‘It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,’ said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to assembled journalists, ‘so you might want to try a restaurant. Or you might want to go shopping, maybe for another pair of sneakers for the march.’ New York is a Democrat city, but also a famous backdrop, and the Republicans took the ...”

“... the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages including murder, arson, horse-gelding and cattle-houghing. Certainly they had developed ostracism as a weapon, causing it to be christened the ‘Boycott’ after the landlord ...”

“... insurance for those of 50 and over’. Excepted from these strictures about Classic FM is Michael Mappin, who keeps the bad jokes to the minimum, isn’t wearingly cheerful and has some specialised knowledge, lightly worn, i.e. he is like an announcer on Radio 3. Most of the others are scarcely past the stage where they snigger at foreign names. 17 ...”

“... was effusive. ‘Wayne, what you are bringing to the table cannot be measured,’ Captain Kevin Jones, commander of the Operations Intelligence Section, wrote to him in 2016. ‘Each gun, each person extracted reduces violence on a larger scale than we could imagine.’ The same year the deputy commissioner gushed: ‘Your leadership is what builds ...”

“... national fund amounted to nearly £56,000, most of it raised in London. The money enabled Inigo Jones to rebuild the west front of the cathedral and to restore the choir – work which was not pulled down until 1687, having been weakened by the Great Fire. By contrast, the Puritan Feoffees of Impropriation, which Ashton hints were not necessarily distrusted ...”

“... Milton Keynes is a direct descendant of Bloomsbury seems about as plausible as trying to show that Michael Foot speaks with the authentic voice of the Levellers. More fundamentally, the central argument of this book, that London’s homely architecture is the product and expression of Londoners’ homely virtues, is chronologically unsound. Most of the ...”

“... should change once victory had been secured. The film’s rather patrician commentary, read by Michael Redgrave and addressed to Timothy, a baby born on the fifth anniversary of Britain’s entry into the conflict, explains what is happening on the home front in 1944 and 1945. In one sequence, Goronwy, a Welsh coalminer, hospitalised by an accident at his ...”