“... find out which gender of “no-good” it was.’ Porter, who wrote so well for low comedians like Jimmy Durante and Bert Lahr, has an ear for the sludge of American speech, and enjoys retailing it to friends. At a party for Douglas Fairbanks Jr, he recounts Samuel Goldwyn’s overheard malapropism: ‘Since the last time I saw you, we’ve passed a lot of ...”

“... been delighted that one of his admirers, Sheena Wellington, stole the show with her rendition of Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’. Neat is a Cornish-born art historian, beekeeper and film-maker who moved to Scotland in the late 1960s. Between 1999 and 2002 he published five highly regarded oral histories of traditional Highland life and ...”

“... Michael Grade programmed Paula Milne’s The Politician’s Wife, Bleasdale’s GBH and Jimmy McGovern’s Hearts and Minds (as well as importing Hill St Blues, ER, Friends and Frasier), but the decision to concentrate on the 16-35 age group led the channel to spurn programmes about quilts in favour of The Girlie Show, a change of direction which ...”

“... throughout his career. And when he was at his most powerful, as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, he won most of the arguments.Brzezinski became a powerful force in the reshaping of US foreign policy at a critical historical moment – the immediate aftermath of the failure in Vietnam. For a few years it seemed that the US leadership class might ...”

“... a man haunted by the whole troubled (and unresolved) matter of his older half-brother, Terry Burns. It was Terry who had introduced the young David Jones to Buddhism, Beat poetry, Mingus, and who later slipped or snapped into genuine psychosis, to lead a cruel jacitation of a life until his eventual suicide in 1985. Bowie himself played with and ...”