“... the cry of Blairite cronyism can be added a still louder cry of class treachery. But what of it? David Kirkwood, one of the original Red Clydesiders of the Twenties, ended up in the House of Lords, and the Glasgow shipowner Joseph Maclay was made a minister by Lloyd George in December 1916 without being required to sit in either House of Parliament. The ...”

“... to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the 1950s, including the Suez crisis, are closed under the Thirty Year ...”

“... Amis bank account. (Fleming, of course, was the biggest earner ever in British fiction and someone wearing his mantle and affecting his style could expect to do very well in the way of royalties. Not that Amis’s motives can have been merely mercenary: he had long declared himself a devotee of the Bond books.) The author of Moscow Gold, ‘John ...”

“... It is a confident, intimate picture. She has a strong chin, her hair is in a Victory Roll, she is wearing a short fitted jacket and is standing in front of a brick wall. The text announces a documentary called Ihre Zellen leben weiter (‘Her Cells Live on’), to be shown on Swiss television. In the accompanying blurb, Margaret Gey is dropped from the Johns ...”

“... an adaptation of Blaise Cendrars’s L’Or, and a version of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. David O. Selznick praised Eisenstein’s Dreiser adaptation, but said that its critique of American society ‘cannot possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans’. ‘Let’s try new things by all ...”

“... early death at the age of 44. As a boy playing on Berkhamsted Common, Greene had cast himself as David Balfour, and as a novelist he can be thought to have given his own bleak twist to the kind of ‘adventure story’ with which Stevenson’s name was for so long associated. In 1949 he began to write a biography of Stevenson, abandoning it only when he ...”

“... He stages tableaux of himself falling, made up in imitation of the news photos. He appears wearing a businessman’s suit in an unannounced location, on a bridge, on an elevated rail track – and drops off the edge (held by a hidden harness), then hangs in the posture of the terrible photograph of an unidentified man plummeting head-down in front of ...”

“... by the pioneers had certainly been very naive. Some of the dancers in the Haddon footage were wearing cardboard masks because they had given up the cannibalistic cult with which they were associated a generation before. Haddon himself had found the cardboard to make them. As late as 1930, Franz Boas used film to document Kwakiutl dancers from British ...”

“... exile was a traumatic experience, whose grip on his personality would tighten over the years. As David Kertzer shows in this subtle and brilliantly told account, the exile of Pius IX was an event that shaped modern Europe. The revolution that broke out in Rome in the spring of 1848 had begun not with protests, but with jubilation. Little was known of ...”

“... Tynan) to write a musical on nuclear war; the Spectator appointed him film critic, and his friend David Astor got him permanent residence and made him a regular reporter on the Observer. Lessing and Sigal inspired and tormented each other in equal measure. ‘She blames me for forcing her into other men’s arms. (“You made me do it. I’m really a one-man ...”

“... It’s got to tear [the audience] apart, scream at them, that’s what my character is.’In David Looseley’s new interpretation, Piaf’s notoriously elusive life story is best told as cultural history. This is a book about Piaf and her crowd. Rather than trying to get to the ‘real’ Piaf, as Robert Belleret did in Piaf, un mythe français ...”

“... published between 1917 and 1920. ‘The investigators came up with some bitter conclusions,’ David Weingast wrote in 1950:They found the Times guilty of having misled its readers on one of the most stupendous events in modern history. The paper had failed in its primary responsibility to publish accurate, reliable information. Whatever its purpose, the ...”

“... the unappealing high school student who is so hard to get rid of. Everyone else in the book keeps wearing the green-tinted spectacles, and no one but Bast shares this erratic pre-teen wizard’s secrets. The trouble is that to make the plot plausible, or near plausible, Edward Bast must become a moral weakling, unsympathetic if not actively annoying, unable ...”

“... infancy. Nazneen stays at home during the day, has few friends other than Razia, who goes around wearing a Union Jack sweatshirt, and is locked into a chafingly dull existence until, in 2001, she falls in love with a sweatshop-owner’s nephew, Karim. Their clandestine affair takes place against a background of increasing Islamisation, which Karim himself ...”

“... staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he said, ‘but we’ll go about our business.’ He was wearing a blue cap that said: ‘Trump. 45th President’. He then spoke to CBS. ‘Someone else died – we’re horrified at that. But this is not going to stop Republicans from participating in the democratic process.’‘What about security?’‘I think ...”