“... business of rewriting for the actors takes up a lot of time in America. I am still surprised that John Malkovich agreed to play Valmont without having it written in his contract that he didn’t have to die. It would have left him available for Dangerous Liaisons II. Diana Ross, on her way to Paris to make a ‘highly personal’ (auteuriste?) film about ...”

“... from the rest of the world. This can go too far. Some of her narration has a stunned, Janet-and-John quality. But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left. Carol did not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back towards New York. Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to Carol’s house for a while, and Therese said to ...”

“... settled for a while in Portugal and eventually retired to Italy, where Maestro Sabatini took pupils, among them the Irish tenor and future Papal Count John McCormack. Rafael spent much of his boyhood with his maternal grandparents in Liverpool and always regarded England as his home. At 17 he started work as a ...”

“... own. Under this heady new influence Jack wrote the story that won him his first publication (in John O’ London’s Weekly) and first fee (six guineas). His first novel to be accepted was also a Saroyanesque essay, Green to Pagan Street, though The Trouble with Harry was published first. By about 1950 he was doing well enough to set up as a full-time ...”

“... political movement. In April 1937 an international commission, headed by the philosopher John Dewey, assembled in Mexico to enquire into the Stalinist charges of conspiracy against Trotsky, and pronounced a verdict totally exonerating him. This was no doubt useful in influencing world opinion in Trotsky’s favour; but a 1938 manifesto signed by ...”

“... at least equally absorbing in Florence. ‘One of them, called Adriana, was so witty she literally took away your breath: you were scared to respire in case you missed a wisecrack.’ This sentence, in describing a temporary apnoea, validates the adverb ‘literally’, without actually specifying the wit that caused the fit. Still, here was a kindred spirit ...”

“... Chanler clan, in the late 19th century, included II orphaned siblings maternally descended from John Jacob Astor. The eldest orphan had eight children, one of whom married Stanford White’s only child Lawrence. This Chanler lady, if you remember, became ‘Mama’ – Lessard’s grandmother with the second-generation liquid jewel/wine face. The Chanlers ...”

“... some memorable examples. My own favourite is an episode, still remembered in some circles, which took place in the Royal Court Theatre in 1958. The Tynans have taken Logue to see a play about a man who found God while being tortured by the Nazis: The Tenth Chance by Stuart Holroyd. The hero is on stage, tied to a chair, being beaten by Gestapo officers while ...”

“... as hiccoughs, which would disappear of their own accord when growth resumed. Even those who took a longer view had grounds for hope. Industrial society was clearly more difficult to govern than it had been twenty years before, but – in Britain as elsewhere – it looked as though the difficulties were being tackled. We had joined the EEC under Heath ...”

“... of the property speculator, and slowly the local political establishment – ruled in Southwark by John O’Grady and his hand-picked ‘mafia’ of loyal Bermondsey councillors – began to listen to the siren songs of the speculators whose seductive promises of high rate income, ‘planning gain’, and glamorous architectural gigantisme, led them inexorably ...”

“... proof readers to leave the following intact? Dinner last night with Malcolm and Kitty. We took with us our enterprising and appealing grandson Benjie Fraser, aged 22, and his enchanting girlfriend, still at St Paul’s. She is the daughter of Caroline (née Blackwood) by her second husband, a Polish musician. Caroline was married earlier to Lucian ...”

“... symbolically, as when the boar-killing on his birthday is read off as ‘the far come close took by the littl come big.’ And like Lisa in The White Hotel, Riddley pursues an obscure ideal of oneness, which he thinks of as ‘that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome’, though his problem is that ‘you try to take holt of the 1 ness and it ...”

“... homosexual proclivities and on his retirement wrote an ode to the penis’, or that Edith Sitwell took to her bed for six weeks after Noel Coward put her in a play as Hernia Whittlebot, or that Ibsen three times over a period of twenty years based characters on a ‘fellow poet, novelist and dramatist whose easy self-confidence’ contrasted with his own ...”

“... employed throughout the text: the use of portmanteau neologisms in the tradition that James Joyce took over from Humpty Dumpty. The effectiveness of the device is more limited than is often allowed: it’s an easy trick to learn, and while the odd hit in this mode attracts praise, who keeps a tally of the numerous misses? But what would seem certain is that ...”

“... Herbert Windt, the composer – was able to synchronise the music correctly ... So I myself took over the task of conducting the 80-man orchestra.’ Kleine Mich with oak leaves, swords and diamonds! She goes on to make the 1936 Olympics film, still reckoned to be the supreme cinematic expression of the athletic ideal. She is decked with honours from ...”