“... at MGM. One reason was that the start of her career there coincided with the loss of her father, Frank Gumm, a small-town vaudevillian. Her first stage performance, at the age of two, was at the theatre he owned in Grand Rapids. She sang ‘Jingle Bells’ and loved it so much she wouldn’t stop, singing the song over and over again. ...”

“... Later Greene acknowledged that the relationship worked best on the page. ‘I, at least, am frank enough to admit that I would not cast aside my material life for you, and as I know you feel the same, why waste time hot airing about it?’ She also described her frustrations with Morgan, who was deeply possessive of his librarian. She was the only one ...”

“... and another advantage of it is that it will annoy his father. The brooding presence of Mrs Bandman Palmer, who acted Hamlet in person on the previous evening, no longer carries its due weight because she has been so completely forgotten. She managed an acting company on the Northern Circuit, which took in Bradford and Huddersfield as well as the larger ...”

“... the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and the formidably educated historian and pedagogue Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. While Fuller remained their leader, she gained important support in return. An equally powerful impetus was her failed attempt to establish a closer bond with Emerson, a man seven years her senior and a married father of two. Fuller was, by all ...”

“... and the argument over how to define and apply Constitutional freedoms begins to turn ugly. Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr, the great liberal Southern jurist on the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, who former Alabama Governor George Wallace called an ‘integrating, carpet-bagging, scalawagging, bald-faced liar’, explained the flammable Constitutional argument ...”

“... be suited by such men, and such fortunes, and such lives. The ineffably confused but real Mrs Palmer at one point burbles of Colonel Brandon: ‘He is such a charming man, that it is quite a pity that he should be so grave and dull.’ The joke is not only, or entirely, on her.Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice are far blither works, with these ...”

“... surroundings, for Wasilla itself – quite unlike its rival and contemporary in the valley, Palmer, 11 miles to the east – is a centreless, sprawling ribbon of deregulated development along a four-lane highway, backed on both sides by subdivisions occupied by trailer-homes, cabins, tract-housing and ranch-style bungalows, most built since 1990. It’s ...”

“... leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to English standards’. Frank Forsdick and his men asked for ‘a bit of old English roast beef or a plate of fish and chips’ and beer instead of wine. It didn’t require the commercial vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such ...”

“... This alludes to a poem Yeats had worked up from a Gaelic lament translated by the former IRA man Frank O’Connor. The poem’s title, ‘The Curse of Cromwell’, was calculated to gratify nationalists, and its acceptance of the thesis that peasant poets inherited the role of the bards as celebrators of the Gaelic elite connects with the republican ...”

“... and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American intervention in Korea in 1950, at which the distinguished scientist claimed to have incontrovertible proof of the use of ...”

“... ageing aunties, old people on their last legs – I choose suitably solid, old-fashioned names: Frank, Harold, Arthur, Nora, names of their period. Just. Because, of course, the personnel of these designated scrapheaps is altering. Ranged in vacant rows or stood immobile by a radiator, these shrunken creatures still answer to Hannah, Arthur, Peggy and ...”

“... primal scream (Spain 1982); Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ leap over Peter Shilton (Mexico 1986); Frank Rijkaard’s fleck of gob caught mid-parabola towards Rudi Völler’s perm, and Gazza’s tears, and Maradona’s tears (Italy 1990); Roberto Baggio’s penalty soaring over the bar (USA 1994); Zinedine Zidane walking past the trophy, head bowed, having ...”