“... civilian populations.’ This is nonsense. The idea that UN workers, eating imported food and wearing flak jackets, paid perhaps $10,000 per month, with generous leave, ready to be evacuated at a moment’s notice, share the same suffering would appear ludicrous to the inhabitants of Sarajevo, Mogadishu or Kigali and to the local staff of relief ...”

“... culture, Valentino advised readers of his published fitness regimen ‘to do their exercises wearing as little clothing as possible’. Valentino’s queer CV includes these tidbits: he endorsed Mineralava face cream, wore a notorious ‘platinum slave bracelet’ (Natacha’s gift), and considered Walt Whitman his favourite poet. (Rudy himself published ...”

“... Rodchenko were in exile in Hollywood and working for Busby Berkeley. Being an anti-Communist means wearing a robe, drinking a Scotch and genuflecting before a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Yet no film gets closer to the way politics was felt during the Cold War: the miasma of repression (political, sexual and otherwise), the tension between American affluence ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Boswell on the occasion of needling his famous friend with the news that the atheist philosopher David Hume had died well and without repentance. ‘The horror of death, which I had always observed in Dr Johnson, appeared strong tonight.’ Sherwin Nuland a surgeon from Yale, speaks to the Johnson in each of us, to our hunger for knowledge of our inevitable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”