“... Rossellini – but also about recent films such as Alien: Resurrection (‘inventive, honest and frank’) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (‘I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot’).At some point I wrote a fan letter to David Thomson. In his reply, he urged me to develop interests other than film. That was Spielberg’s problem, Thomson said ...”

“... Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to ...”

“... out that court records show the working classes were just as up for it. Douglas Plummer, in his frank book Queer People (1963), insisted that ‘for every Hugh Walpole there are many thousands of ordinary labourers or lorry drivers or salesmen who are also homosexual.’ It’s a world where Walpole is still a touchstone, of class, artistic status and, 22 ...”

“... will be interesting to see if Hollywood makes Craig look as sallow-cheeked and paunchy as Michael Nyqvist, the lead actor in the Swedish films, or – more unlikely still – if Mara looks as pierced, forbidding and downright scary as the ordinarily very pretty Noomi Rapace does in the originals.) There are other sides to the Larsson industry too. On ...”

“... personal life (as an adult, anyway) or the relationship between work and family. Inglis is frank about this. ‘Recreating the necessarily private magnificence of the Hoggarts’ family life is impossible to me,’ he writes. ‘I don’t know enough and I haven’t the talent. But its actuality cannot be doubted.’ There is a contrast here with ...”

“... isn’t clear that British politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as such: ‘an acknowledgment of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from ...”

“... grow up sound, just as Milne himself did, according to the not unmalicious eulogy propounded by Frank Swinnerton. Milne is so far out of the literary fashion that he failed to detest his parents. His parents had previously failed to ill-treat and misunderstand him. He failed to detest his school and his schoolfellows. He married early, and his marriage ...”

“... not like myself ... I deprecated the impacted layers of repression that prevented me from being frank and free and emotional.’ The result was a seeming, in the end perhaps a habitual callousness. It is revealing to read, in his most considerable historical book, The Survival of Scotland (1968), a sentence starting, ‘In the temper of today, when social ...”

“... pleasure. But he hasn’t yielded, as some of his colleagues yielded. There is a sense in which Frank O’Connor stayed, imaginatively, in the small towns of his boyhood, and let the new Ireland mind its own grubby business. Liam O’Flaherty, too, wrote as if his first experiences were definitive and could only be lost if pestered by later matters. ...”

“... optimism -‘cheerfulness in the bunker’ – before polling day in the 1874 General Election. ‘Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign’ is a cheeky aside, given that Jenkins evidently expects his readers to remember who was in which bunker at the relevant moment. There is more to Gladstone, however, than politics. His restless energy ...”

“... did not draw on classical literature. Women could be ‘lovers of their own sex’ or, in the more frank Greek loan word, ‘tribades’ (literally ‘rubbers’; the words ‘rubster’ and ‘fricatrice’ were also used in the 17th century). The OED cites no usage of ‘lesbianism’ in the modern sense before 1870, when it was used to argue that ...”

“... made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s 90 not looking much different from when I first got to know her at Bianchi’s in the 1960s. Barry as usual fires off the jokes which are almost his trademark but ...”

“... of human activity and contact, silting up in vast unchartable archives. In Repeated Takes, Michael Chanan has written a concise history of the technology that has wrought this change and the commercial and creative forces that have shaped it. His account is elegant and impressively well-informed. He ranges across the entire technical field, from ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... in a mental asylum in Ithaca, New York; and Max Ferber, a fictional character based on the painter Frank Auerbach, who left his parents behind in Germany in 1939, when he escaped for England.When The Emigrants appeared in Michael Hulse’s English translation, in 1996, it was often described as a book about four victims of ...”