“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... Julian Barnes’s diary). He records meeting, in the same week, Princess Margaret, Ionesco and David Hockney. David Bowie offers to take over a part in The Real Thing; the Duchess of Devonshire appears as ‘Debo’ on page 33. Stoppard is not unaware of the effect: ‘I’m getting quite impressed by some of our ...”

“... American writer deserving revival, but they take very different approaches to her life and work. David Roberts was mesmerised by this ‘enigmatic, thwarted writer’ and sought to unravel her story with the help of Eve Auchincloss, Stafford’s friend and editor, and her 42-year correspondence with ex-lover and friend Robert Hightower. He paints a ...”

“... prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the ...”

“... of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating polemics: but in part, too, it ...”

“... more dramatic than in Miami, a great resort and retirement capital for the Northeast, now – as David Rieff puts it in Going to Miami – a mirror city to Havana. There have been no less than five recent books on Miami, of which those by Rieff and Joan Didion,* quite different in tone and treatment, are the most prominent. Miami has also become crucial to ...”

“... value for Britons. Apart from the fascination of looking on at someone else’s quarrels (’such nice people, really, but don’t you just love a good row?’), there is great value in an alternative hearing of debates that also bicker on this side of the Atlantic. And I am grateful, so very grateful to Professor Wilson for not writing with the dystrophied ...”

“... Barry will, I’d imagine, be a familiar one to many readers: the runt, the bully, the supposedly nice one, who of course needs the others to make him feel more on top of things than he actually is. This is just one of the classic ways in which men bond. What has happened to Rob and his girlfriend will be equally familiar. Laura has left her live-in partner ...”

“... but esoteric science. The part of Bill Clinton is here played by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist David Baltimore and the junior female colleague is not Monica Lewinsky but a Japanese-Brazilian-American immunologist named Thereza Imanishi-Kari. Their relations are not sexual but wholly collegial. The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but ...”

“... pleasure that remains to me: I indulge in reading about movies with undiminished enthusiasm. David Thomson has written about his disappointment with contemporary cinema, about how the franchise movie and the blockbuster are killing Hollywood and his hopes, and because I am one of the legion of Thomson’s devoted fans, it cheers me up to hear it. If he ...”

“... with them at weigh-ins or press conferences, saying: ‘We’re going to fight, which is not a nice thing.’ A devout Roman Catholic, he took it on himself to be the champion of Christendom and the Civil Rights movement. When he was beaten by Liston, he pasted on a false beard – he had brought one with him in case of defeat – and took a flight to ...”

“... deal that needed explaining. Some, like the Italian interviewer, have dwelt on the appeal of the David-and-Goliath conflict between the Gauls and the Roman superpower. Or, at least, David and Goliath with a twist: Astérix doesn’t beat brute force by superior cunning and intelligence – he does it thanks to his ...”

“... 11 January. It’s not to disparage David Bowie, but if even a fraction of the tributes being paid to him and his influence were true we would never have had a Conservative government or indeed any government at all. Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots ...”

“... matter as hopeless’. He disliked speaking about his background because, as he said (working a nice line in parodic lordliness), ‘one has so little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary.’ One childhood pleasure was rummaging among the books in his father’s shop. The hodge-podge of works he found there, from arcane philosophy to popular ...”

“... that the press and media are setting out as the crucial issues before the nation.’ This is nice for editors. But it defies rational explanation. Koss calls this sort of influence ‘a quasi-meteorological power’, a weather-forecasting function to which politicians become addicted. The one thing that party leaders dread is silence. Any voice from the ...”