“... Eyes, striking illustrations of Nazis measuring noses, and an amazing fullpage photograph of Bette Davis from the Museum of Modern Art archives. This encyclopedia is full of surprises, of unexpected juxtapositions. It is the product of imaginative minds and of leading scholars not afraid to challenge the orthodoxies: the bibliographies are bold too, and right ...”

“... Politics and This Week, was the editor of the Sunday Times in the Thatcher period; or that Evan Davis, the presenter of Newsnight, was part of the team at the Institute of Fiscal Studies that devised the poll tax; or that the policy editor of Newsnight, Chris Cook, used to be an adviser to David Willetts; or that Nick Robinson, shortly to replace James ...”

“... into the green and pleasant suburbs. All of this changed over the following two decades.As John Davis points out, the idea that London started to ‘swing’ in the 1960s was largely the concoction of journalists in need of a story, most of them American. But in Soho and on the King’s Road in Chelsea, ideas were taking shape that would eventually change ...”

“... R.W. Burchfield and John Sykes) is comparatively stable. When work began on the new Collins, Paul Procter and Della Summers were young conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins when he had finished a somewhat similar job for Hamlyn. Both Urdang and ...”

“... women’, to whom women in the audience could relate; and ‘exaggerated women’ in the Bette Davis mould. Barton suggests that Lamarr falls into the ‘fantasy’ category and that her dreamlike image ‘threatened to overwhelm her reality’. It certainly threatened the lives of her children. Her daughter said that when she was packed off to boarding ...”

“... in Britain and America coincide with an intensification of racial thinking? David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage throws light on the process by which slavery became exclusively black. There were many European precedents for white slavery, not only in the classical period but in the trading networks of the late medieval Mediterranean. The word ...”

“... to economic stagnation. Either way America had nothing to fear.In his cool-headed history, Schism, Paul Blustein takes issue with both these interpretations. So too do Bob Davis and Lingling Wei in their more journalistic account, Superpower Showdown. With hindsight it is clear that the policymakers of the 1990s and early ...”

“... study of cartoons), on Phyllis Deane, the economic historian, and indeed on Natalie Zemon Davis? And, while I am labouring this particular point, should women’s history really be catalogued – as it is here – as feminist history? Women’s history is essentially an attempt to describe the past of women instead of – and preferably as well as ...”

“... we may have forgotten a few details. Like the moment when Jean Seberg admiringly reads to Jean-Paul Belmondo a line from Faulkner’s Wild Palms: ‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.’ He replies: ‘Grief is stupid. I choose nothing.’ Or the moment that you won’t have forgotten but I had, when a young woman accosts Belmondo on the ...”

“... for short, fragmentary forms (which can seem to prefigure those used by a writer like Lydia Davis, who has translated some of Walser’s writings on art) over the epic and ‘mature’ monumentality of the novel. With Hannah Arendt’s advocacy, Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares were seen as having predicted the rise of the Third Reich, and later the ...”

“... out against brittle sophistication.The supreme exponent of brittle sophistication was Bette Davis, and for my aunties in particular she was someone to emulate. With her clipped tones, raised eyebrow and mocking smile Bette was a standard-bearer for shop assistants everywhere and in the 1940s you could find her presiding over the counters of the smarter ...”

“... of a world revolution of the common man, aimed at a new world of plenty and security’. Paul Addison, in Now the war is over, an excellent book derived from a good TV series, sees Common Wealth as representing a ‘strand of socialist utopianism, to be found mainly among the professional middle classes, that ran through the Forties’. Yet Richard ...”

“... after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon differs in detail from that of Aubrey Davis, the security guard who accompanied him to the site. It may be unfair to demand detailed and accurate recall of those moments when he and Davis marched along the smoke-filled Pentagon corridors on their way to the crash ...”

“... and tried to get John Dee to put him in touch with the heavenly orders. True, there had been Pope Paul III, a politician if ever there was one and founder of the Counter-Reformation: he retained an astrologer to tell him, I suppose, when it was prudent to launch the Society of Jesus or set up the Roman Inquisition (which was to persecute astrologers). Since ...”

“... women is the category with the biggest stars: ‘ferocious women like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn’, on the one hand, and, on the other, excessively noble women like Loretta Young and Greer Garson. Garson was preceded by Norma Shearer and followed Deborah Kerr – ‘and lest anyone think we have left such female ...”