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“... of people who worked outside – and against – official Government policy. Chief among them was James Guerin, a Bible-thumping chorister-entrepreneur from Connecticut, who made a fortune by flouting his Government’s policy on arm sales – especially to South Africa and Iraq. When he was short of money in 1987, Guerin came to Britain and tricked one of ...”

“... Born too late – and that was the least of it – to be James Fenton, I cannot claim to have spent the fall of Saigon hitchhiking to President Nguyen Van Thieu’s palace aboard a Northern Vietnamese tank. By the time I reached the city, more than a decade after the President’s government was toppled, I was also a little late to experience the thrill that the poet and war correspondent had felt in living through its death throes ...”

“... Windsor in 1917. Her method, already perfected in her unauthorised and unflattering biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan, is to write bestsellers that take what she describes as ‘an unblinking look’ at their subjects – which might, of course, mean that her eyes are permanently open or permanently closed. To this end, she has spent four years ...”

“... turnstiles to get in for free; that of Russ Hodges, a radio commentator; those of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason who have arrived together. Gleason is playing hookey from a rehearsal for The Honeymooners , has been drinking hooch and stuffing himself with junk food, and is sick on Sinatra’s shoes at the climactic moment of the game. Hoover ...”

“... and in some cases certainly do, construe this as overhearing a distinctive poetic voice.’ So Frank O’Hara addresses a leaf: ‘Leaf! You are so big!/How can you change your/colour, then just fall!’ and John Ashbery talks to a fictional reader who is not there: ‘Why do I tell you these things?/You are not even here!’ These fictional addresses to ...”

“... on by Hamlet in staging the play that catches the conscience of King Claudius. George Buchanan, James I’s tutor, saw the depiction of tyranny in his own tragedies as an instrument of James’s education. The blunt couplets of The Mirror for Magistrates supplied vivid warnings of the destruction that awaits kings and ...”

“... their charm, like credits in early films which “introduce” Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. But they didn’t in the end quite merit selection.’) The book is organised thematically, and if it isn’t immediately clear why a piece in praise of cats comes under ‘Religion, Politics and Philosophy’ instead of, say, ‘Autobiography and ...”

“... spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American crash: the James Dean, Eddie Cochran legend-sealer; the Bob Dylan at Woodstock disaster turned into an opportunity for reinvention; and the sweet Gene Vincent long martyrdom. Clift could have been another James Dean. Instead he was ...”

“... divorced her way through the interwar years with gayer abandon than most. During one particularly frank sexual discussion at a party she was tapped on the shoulder by Virginia Woolf, who said, somewhat dampeningly, ‘Remember: we won this for you.’ Nearly twenty years younger than Woolf, on the threshold of adolescence in 1914, Lehmann was more ambivalent ...”

“... divisions were heightened by growing militancy in the trade union movement, particularly when Frank Cousins became leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in 1956. At the TUC Congress that year Cousins rejected government calls for wage restraint and told delegates: ‘In a period of freedom for all, we are part of the all.’ Whereas ...”

“... out that court records show the working classes were just as up for it. Douglas Plummer, in his frank book Queer People (1963), insisted that ‘for every Hugh Walpole there are many thousands of ordinary labourers or lorry drivers or salesmen who are also homosexual.’ It’s a world where Walpole is still a touchstone, of class, artistic status and, 22 ...”

“... films. In which case, why do they say ‘lovely’ and pass by? Why do they not cry out that Henry James is much more? Even that there is distress, irony, doubt and mystery in the voice of E.M. Forster that these films miss? Thomson’s anti-middlebrow fervour also seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his love ...”

“... analysis. The famous descriptions in Notes of the natural stone bridge over a branch of the James River, and of the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge Mountains, establish the picturesque by means of cunningly juxtaposed evocations of the sublime and the beautiful. (The first of these terms, perhaps because American topography was supposed ...”

“... compiling lists, but the lists themselves are interesting. For example: Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, James Wong Howe, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, John Garfield, Charlie Chaplin and Leo McCarey all attended a reception in July 1943 for the Soviet director and administrator Mikhail Kalatozov. At that time Russian and American propaganda methods ...”

“... and moderate? Master and slave? Dictator and compliant intellectual? (This was how C.L.R. James saw them in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, written during his detention on Ellis Island in 1952 and republished last year.) Or are they merely chalk and cheese? Would the debates of the 1930s and 1940s, which cast Ahab as a Hitler or a Stalin and ...”