“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... one of the newer kinds of alienation. ‘Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do,’ David Bowie sang in ‘Space Oddity’, the song that captured something of that strangeness. (It was featured in the BBC’s live coverage of the lunar landing.) Bowie, in his spaceman/ androgyne mode, conveyed the idea that space travel could change a man for ...”

“... identification. A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite: Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel ...”

“... to Italy from Hollywood) with Farley Granger; De Sica’s Stazione Termini (1953) starred Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift. De Sica had originally planned to make Bicycle Thieves with Hollywood funding. David O. Selznick, the prospective producer, wanted Cary Grant for the lead role; De Sica suggested Henry Fonda. Umberto ...”

“... Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... literature, his reactions were not without a touch of sceptical irreverence (Ernest Jones becomes ‘Erogenous Jones’); and a whole tradition of thought about the cogito and the unconscious, from Descartes to Lacan, was later summarised and parodied in the wonderful exchange between the two anti-heroes of ...”

“... Such donnish tolerance was rare. The most ferocious analyst of his immaturity was probably David Holbrook, whose account of Thomas’s ‘infantile egocentricity’ in Llareggub Revisited (1962) represents a high-water mark of Leavisite moralism. Thomas shows ‘an impotence of language belonging to an impotence in living’, Holbrook said, and quoted ...”

“... no need to question since for her there was now only one thing – Stephen.’ Even their dog David responds to Stephen’s masterful nature, seeing that ‘queer, intangible something about her that appealed to the canine manhood in him’. (But David is fickle: when a real man comes on the scene he finds Martin ‘a ...”

“... the same root as ‘rune’ or ‘secret’. The drama of the proceedings zings off the pages of David Carpenter’s magisterial new study. What Carpenter does better than his rivals or predecessors is to make clear the continuing intensity of events after Runnymede and the hectic pace of them. Within days of its sealing, engrossments of the Charter were ...”

“... back to the landscape of terns and gulls, to Pip’s encounter with Magwitch on the marshes. Tom Jones, on the other hand, gives its hero the least interpretable name you could imagine. This hero sounds not just ordinary but so ordinary he must eventually become as significant as his guardian, the over-aptly named Allworthy. Giving a character a completely ...”

“... the same time accusing me.’ Meanwhile, a longtime friend and ally of Rubio, former Congressman David Rivera, is facing a series of ethics proceedings, the Washington Post reports, for ‘routinely billing the state for travel and other expenses while paying himself back out of campaign accounts when he was a state legislator’. In 2005, Rivera and Rubio ...”

“... no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The President, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a ...”

“... Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’, the Dunciad, Fielding’s Journey from This World to the Next and Tom Jones, and a severe account of Boswell’s journals for 1778-1785: ‘the journals deal not only with (in Gray’s words) “what he heard and saw” but also with what he thought and felt, and the interest of that, as distinct from its quantity, is eminently ...”

“... Lightbown describes. A bolder hypothesis is needed. As it happens, one such was advanced by David Landau in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford, organised in 1979. It is almost impossible to get hold of a copy of this catalogue and I wonder whether Lightbown has done so (although he does list the publication in ...”