“... agency or another. In Dead Lions, Diana Taverner, head of operations at the Park (Kristin Scott Thomas on the telly), says to a subordinate: ‘I sometimes worry you’re going over to the enemy.’ He looks ‘shocked’ and replies: ‘MI6?’ She says she means her boss at MI5. It’s a joke, but it’s funny because it’s true. The exchange is ...”

“... The week​ before he was fired from MGM, late in 1931, Scott Fitzgerald was having lunch with the screenwriter Dwight Taylor in the company canteen when something, or even two things, more disturbing than his own drunken dreams appeared and sat at his table. The apparition was a pair of Siamese twins. ‘One of them picked up the menu,’ Taylor remembered, ‘and, without even looking at the other asked: “What are you going to have?” Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors ...”

“... Drakard established a rival newspaper, the Stamford News, edited by the radical journalist John Scott, who was later to edit the London Magazine. The village of Helpston itself was caught between two landed and political interests: Burghley Park was the seat of the Exeters, who were Tories, while the Milton Estate belonged to the Fitzwilliams, who were ...”

“... when it came to discussing specifics or attempting to define his vision. The critic Nathan Scott recalled listening carefully to an hour-long lecture by Ellison and finding himself unable to ‘get hold of anything, except the vernacular and the marvellous capacity it had for capturing “complexity”’. Ellison never stopped pursuing this, but it ...”

“... were thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland stone. ABK never recovered, and ...”

“... of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary ...”

“... we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to fight’ in Iraq. I heard him say: ‘You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. I like brawling.’ I heard that Donald Rumsfeld had created his own intelligence agency, the Strategic Support Branch, ‘designed to operate ...”

“... her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes. ‘Maude Hutchins,’ James Kelly wrote in 1955, does ‘as she pleases’ as a novelist and ‘to date what has pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who went about ‘describing casually all ...”

“... climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity – we will learn to live together, co-operate with one another, and recognise the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America – the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice ...”

“... from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene’.When the BBC switched to recording on tape, which could be ...”

“... boy for Reuters, an office boy for an auctioneer, a junior clerk for Sunlight Soap and Jordan & Co, and a cashier for an engineering company. It was sprinting he excelled at, though, which presumably served him well at Reuters, where he’d sometimes carry out his duties on roller skates. Curiously, the name given to his kind of running was ...”

“... in Notes and Queries for 1952, that the source for Browning’s ‘Cavalier Tunes’ was in Walter Scott’s Woodstock. And this raises the possibility – very unlikely, I think – that Pound drew directly on Scott without needing Browning as intermediary. However, Pound was a very bookish poet, as Browning was also. In ...”

“... more.’ The phrase picks up old slogans from Thomas Wolfe (‘You can’t go home again’) and Scott Fitzgerald (‘“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried, incredulously. “Why, of course you can”’), but it also adds its own, Vietnam-nourished insight. Willard has changed, but home has changed too, transformed itself into an idea only other people ...”

“... long predates the internet, as does the mentality and culture of fandom (he notes that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a fanatical supporter of the Princeton football team, to a point where he would call the coach to offer tactical advice, some of which may even have inspired a new tactic known as the ‘two-platoon system’ in the 1930s). But the internet ...”

“... he mentions ‘rackety parties’, ‘the rackety side of life’ (this in connection with Scott Fitzgerald), a ‘somewhat rackety woman’, and a character at the Oxford of Philip Larkin’s novel Jill is said to be ‘an aggressively rackety minor-public-school undergraduate’. ‘Rackety types have a link with people of the intellect,’ Powell ...”