“... Yesterday (an error I fell into)? How be casual with Katharine Hepburn or do anything but gaze at Steve McQueen?My best plan, I found, was to make a mental note of who was there so that I could write home that night, then go and get some food at the vast buffet and gracefully retire. But it often turned out that the nicest people were at the buffet, or ...”

“... 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 she had a ...”

“... of the Black Police Association – the story of his early days in the Met was dramatised by Steve McQueen in the Small Axe series – recalls that his fellow recruits ‘saw things in a very “them and us” way, with the police being the “us” and the rest of the public as “them”’.4 The job ‘seemed to attract people who are quite set ...”

“... Cincinnati Kid some time. My brother liked that one. He liked the book better, but he liked the Steve McQueen character in the film, the gambler, the five-card stud player, the Kid who comes to town to take on the Man (Edward G. Robinson). My brother liked the notion of being the Kid, the hard living, hard loving, haunted, hounded ...”

“... boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him – the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio – and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point of the whole exercise he said it was simple: ‘Buy in, sell out, make some zeroes.’ MacGregor described Wright ...”