“... Jackie said it in a thoughtful, reflective way; he showed the side that made Charles a great king afterwards.’ A year later MacGowran made his London debut as the Young Covey in The Plough and the Stars, becoming friends with its author, Sean O’Casey. In 1956 in London he played – to much critical acclaim from critics such as Kenneth Tynan and ...”

“... if one says – and nearly every reviewer says this kind of thing at least once a week – that King Lear is a good play and The Four Just Men is a good thriller, what meaning is there in the word “good”?’ His real beef was that too regular, too poorly paid employment could turn good reviewers bad. Cut to the present day: ‘In a cold but stuffy ...”

“... outside the restriction of their lives and are lost to themselves. Slouching towards Kalamazoo by Peter De Vries, is about sexual liberation and the 19th century’s heritage: its first half jokily replays the situation of The Scarlet Letter in a small Mid-Western town in the late 1950s. The narrator is Tony Thrasher, the precociously witty and allusive son ...”

“... is most successful when it is describing these years. The list of names here, from Val Parnell to Peter Brough, from Alan Melville to Jimmy Edwards, reads like a history of British Variety. Even then, unconsciously a student of Method, she would dress up in gymslip and boater, catapult in hand, to do Monica for the wireless. She went to Hollywood for the ...”

“... has had some effect). He dismisses, at first, what seems to be a crank call offering a scoop about Peter Lyons, the Labour justice minister at Holyrood and a man widely seen as heir apparent to the party’s leader. But this story isn’t about fumbling with a diary secretary, subletting a tax-subsidised constituency office or even setting fire to curtains at ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... party to an almost impregnable domination of English politics. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail King Arthur rides up to a muddy peasant and announces: ‘I am Arthur, king of the Britons.’ ‘King of the who? . . . Who are the Britons?’ The ...”

“... new publications from the States: Mailer, His Life and Times, by (that means ‘transcribed by’) Peter Manso, and Conversations with Capote by (can this be the correct spelling?) Lawrence Grobel.1 Each book goes far, and unpleasantly, beyond mere feet-kissing, and each offers a neat image of the sort of literary-critical milieu in which the Mailers and ...”

“... and, thanks to him, we know quite a lot more about Evelyn, such as his conviction that the king was leading the country back to a Commonwealth or his description of Lady Denham, the Duke of York’s mistress, ‘bitchering’. For most of his married life, Evelyn lived at Sayes Court, Deptford, of which nothing at all remains. Apart from an idealised ...”

“... Tom McClintock, the inestimable Arianna Huffington and the former Baseball League Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. By no coincidence, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy – on the Jay Leno Tonight show – on the day Issa withdrew. It was clear from the outset that if a ‘No on Recall’ vote supporting Davis failed to pass by even a slight ...”

“... will be curable in the context of our boundless longevity?When do you stop being who you are?For Peter Pan, death was an awfully big adventure. For Saul Bellow, it was the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.‘Nothing good ever really dies,’ a middle-aged man told me in the drinks queue at Abba Voyage in Stratford. ‘It just ...”

“... Castle, a plain inscription remembering him as ‘Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney’. Greville’s life of Sidney, written in the earlier part of James’s reign, is a study in failure. ‘He never was magistrate, nor possessed of any fit stage for eminence to act upon.’ For ‘want of clear ...”

“... of the early Seventies. Several of the players – Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter, Johnny Giles, Peter Lorimer, Alan ‘Sniffer’ Clarke – had a lot of ability, but they also tended to have Jekyll-and-Hyde natures, the Hyde component of which their manager, Don Revie, did nothing to suppress. The fact that the most successful team in English football was ...”

“... girlhood’; in 1937 they were absorbed, both in London and Ottawa, in the preparations for King George VI’s coronation. Elizabeth – ‘all pink and white and golden’, as Ritchie remembered her – was much more enthusiastic than her sister Jane, an unimpressed aggressive girl who resented the flummery and chiefly remembered not having been able ...”

“... notably Pietro da Corona and Jacques-Louis David) had done so, is the subsequent decision made by King Seleucus to give Stratonice to his son to save the boy’s life. I take it that this is the act which could be described as the father’s ‘melting’. And yet the King’s grief for his son is surely such that we must ...”