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“... in Bringing Up Baby, a leopard-skin dressing-gown in My Favourite Wife, full drag in I Was a Male War Bride. The more renownedly well-fitting his own clothes were, the funnier he was in someone else’s. In the Hitchcock film, the suit marks a turning-point: having been kidnapped, Grant (Roger Thornhill) is taken to a country house and interrogated by James ...”

“... in 1948 to read medicine. In due course he switched to literature and graduated with a second-class degree. Achebe is not exactly self-effacing but his demeanour makes him seem so; a soft-spoken man, modest to a fault, gently pushing a liberal humanist agenda. When I met him in 1962 at a conference of African writers I wrote in the Guardian that he looked ...”

“... Howard and Gore had flown eastward from Rome on Singapore Airlines, at what seemed a bargain first-class rate, around the world.’ (That ‘seemed’ sounds suspicious. Did Howard and Gore mistakenly pay full fare?) Kaplan also keeps tabs on Vidal’s ground transport. ‘From Gulfport he took the bus back to New Orleans, from which at the end of February he ...”

“... as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow Northern poets into selections from the cheese-board ...”

“... by President Reagan and by Mrs Kirkpatrick at the UN, with an acute consequent increase in Cold War tensions – was propagated despite the existence of firm intelligence evidence that it was untrue. This is, in several ways, a rather curious emphasis. It is, for a start, hardly news: as I pointed out in my own book, the fact that the Reagan Administration ...”

“... and Old Catholic. The Old Catholics are pretty well spread about the world. During the last war they were helpful to Anglicans in Java and even in Nazi Germany: their Dutch and Swiss congregations support an Anglican diocese in South Africa. They have been in full communion with the Church of England for 50 years, and Gordon Huelin’s collection of ...”

“... for his work in Hollywood, Conrad tartly observes, combines ‘existential reprimand with a middle-class Philistine’s envy of the rewards’. Wherever you turn in this book Conrad sounds brisk, assured, giddy in his confident marshalling of terms, patterns, brisk, assured and misleading. He is anxious always to be dazzling, outrageous, ‘brilliant’ in ...”

“... theory. Some analysts attribute this to the demographic contraction of the traditional working-class base, some to the lack of appeal of collectivist and socialist values, and yet others to the apparent dominance of sectarian extremists in the Party, particularly in local government. Whatever the combination of reasons for Labour’s loss of appeal, the ...”

“... a one-time security man, Duszek, once instructed to eliminate Konwicki in the early days after the war, but now thoroughly mellowed out, and given to uttering gnomic pieces of folk wisdom about the Poles, little gems like ‘Drink makes a Pole merry,’ ‘When a Pole complains, he feels better right away,’ ‘When a Pole sees a balcony, he wants to ...”

“... in French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, or British Malaya and Singapore till after World War Two. From very early on, Rizal exhibited remarkable literary abilities. At the age of 19 he entered an open literary competition, and won first prize, defeating Spanish rivals writing in their native tongue. He was growing up at a time when modern politics ...”

“... and it is getting worse. Massey and Denton found its racial segregation particularly resistant to class advancement – even when black people earned more money it made relatively little difference to the degree of segregation they experienced. The idea that blacks could improve their circumstances by working hard at school, going to college and getting a ...”

“... and Gérald Darmanin as minister of public action and accounts. His most prominent spoil of war on the left was the PS’s Gérard Collomb, who accepted the ministry of the interior (a difficult job, which carries responsibility for the treatment of migrants and refugees). Other important posts were offered to people who had made their names in the ...”

“... Wyatt was awarded a one-year contract for the then substantial salary of £2800, with ‘first-class travel throughout’. Within months, it was being remarked in newspapers that Wyatt’s melodramatic but pioneering location reports (‘To my right, are Africa and Egypt . . . Behind me is Gibraltar’) were making him more influential than he had been as ...”

“... So Rankin gave James Kelman’s first book to his father. His sort of thing, I thought. Working-class working man against the system. Dad couldn’t read it. Said it wasn’t ‘written in English’. Said there wasn’t any story. I was shocked. This was literature. It was good for you. It was the stuff I was studying. Dad’s reaction made me think about ...”

“... the general appeal of taking risks. ‘Like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine class’, Dallek writes, he considered himself ‘entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the ...”