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“... You might think that a man whose lovers include Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Robert Ryan and Cary Grant must have had some kind of good time, but no one gets to have much fun in Higham’s book. Higham explains with nice elaboration that, with women, Hughes ...”

“... alcoholic, rather sadistic character, who manages at times to be quite endearing and droll in a Bette Davis, damn-the-torpedos sort of way. You are not likely to forget Mother. There is a delicate love story, ‘Romance’, which takes place in upper Manhattan and involves two 40-ish professionals. It is told in such a different register that it might have ...”

“... Gloria Stuart, of Titanic fame, has been here for lunch. Turney wrote women’s pictures for Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Ida Lupino, Rosalind Russell and Ann Sheridan, and her script helped Crawford win the Oscar for Mildred Pierce (1945). She comes to the Library every day, which makes her, at 92, its oldest regular reader – and she’s better-looking ...”

“... account is Madelene de Solière, who in the ideal film version of this book would be played by Bette Davis. Having run off to a Franciscan friary in Paris to marry a handsome prince of Saxony, heir to a score of titles, the young woman discovered, to no one else’s surprise, that he was a conman, who promptly disappeared. Her subsequent conversion to ...”

“... do with being mad. Cats acted pretty mad about the whole thing and all the movie stars seemed mad. Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck were downright mean. Bella Lynn and her friends would slouch in the Court Café, blowing smoke from their nostrils like petulant dragons . . .’ In my day it was dangerous and wicked. Father Haley, a Jesuit in Chile (in fact ...”

“... to the transparency of art or perhaps to the ineffectualness of abstinence. Twenty years ago Ms Bette Davis’s autobiography scathingly said: ‘I wonder how Michelangelo would have sculptured and painted today? Would all that beauty and nobility be sacrificed to the grafitto, John Loves John?’ (This passage seems to confirm that ‘sculptured’ is a ...”

“... to betray him. His affair with the star (called ‘Jean Shaw’ and a compound of Veronica Lake, Bette Davis and Loretta Young) revives dangerous nostalgia for Hollywood’s clear-cut moralities:   ‘And I remember – I don’t know if it was that picture or another one – you shot the bad guy. He looks at the blood on his hand, looks down at his ...”

“... climate that exists a decade after his death, the Journals merely join the ranks of Barbra and Bette and Liz and Liza and others from humble or ‘dysfunctional’ backgrounds, waiting to cough their guts to Johnny or Dave or Merv or Oprah in prime time. Rumours of an incestuous relationship between Cheever and his brother have recently been bruited, in ...”

“... the novelist’s death in 1937, Hollywood was turning this family romance into a movie co-starring Bette Davis and Miriam ...”

“... employer outraged and weeping, sets off in search of love and life. It’s what always happened to Bette Davis. Why should it not happen to you? MISS PLUNKETT: Because, you verbose fool, I have no money. I have no skills. I cannot drive. I cannot even type. All I can do is keep mother company. MR MORTIMER: And wait. MISS PLUNKETT: Yes, wait. MR MORTIMER: Until ...”

“... see continuity in ways other than the straightforwardly linear. What lends Middlemarch or Cousin Bette their coherence isn’t the recurrence of a single character or motif, but a complex overlapping of features. As Wittgenstein observes, what gives strength to the rope that tethers a ship to the dock isn’t a single fibre running through it. Why in any ...”

“... Taylor, Barbra Streisand), some achieved stardom (Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe), some had stardom thrust upon them (Lana Turner, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck). ‘More stars than there are in heaven’ was MGM’s boast and, in a way, its accomplishment. At this particular ...”

“... book called What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, co-authored with the Dutch artist Bette A. Not a book so much as a series of cheery Post-it notes for a mood board, it covers a lot of the same ground as some of the essays appended to the Diary. The core message is that art is something that helps us imagine what it is to make new worlds. It can ...”

“... 1930, using calculations based on the family tree of the virus and the rate at which it mutates. Bette Korber, the head of the research team, said she thought Hooper’s thesis was unlikely, but would not rule it out. Hooper does not pretend the OPV/Aids hypothesis is watertight; it is offered soberly, if insistently, as the theory which best fits the ...”

“... Broadway, in Cactus Flower and Applause, a musical adaptation of All about Eve. Bacall took the Bette Davis role, and won a Tony. A decade later she won another one for the musical Woman of the Year. By then she was a New York fixture, living in a magnificent apartment in the Dakota building at 72nd Street and Central Park West. There had been another ...”