“... by people who know that the spokesman for the original America First movement, 77 years ago, was Charles Lindbergh, an anti-Semite who warmly sympathised with Hitler’s politics. (How many of these people also know that John F. Kennedy was an early supporter of America First?) But the underlying question was not whether Trump was giving a secret signal to ...”

“... McKenna in 1957 It was strange being alone with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished ...”

“... Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration ...”

“... That’s an understatement. It was on the day of Oscar Hornung’s birth, 24 March 1895, that Frank Harris met Wilde at the Café Royal and advised him to drop his libel suit against Lord Queensberry. Ten days later, the disastrous libel suit opened at the Old Bailey, and only three weeks after that, Wilde was himself in the dock. Would you really want to ...”

“... books I swotted up for my scholarship. Remembering Bruce MacFarlane was at Dulwich, I wander into Charles Barry’s huge hammerbeam hall, the walls lined with honours boards of distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge chiefly; though there’s some mention of the Army and the Indian Civil Service, there is none of any other universities or places of higher ...”

“... friend who had done most to look after the dying Acker and whom she had appointed her executor. Frank Molinaro, whom Acker had paid for astrological advice, passed out business cards in the car park, then grabbed hold of the vase with the cremains in it. ‘The astrologer ran toward the sea tossing handfuls of ash and bone while he proclaimed ...”

“... of Lagos. The inevitable consequence was the crushing of the oil unions and the incarceration of Frank Kokori, the abrasive Secretary-General of NUPENG, the more radical of the unions. Kokori remains in detention. According to his wife, he is shunted from one prison to another, is rarely allowed visitors and is in poor health. Some say he is going blind. The ...”

“... instead of ‘with’ and ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’: Emily Dickinson via Charles Bukowski; Artaud and Bataille laced with American me-first and can-do. Like many rock acts, she’d had years to dream up her world-shut-your-mouth arrival, then suddenly had no time at all to patch together a follow-up. Only ten months on from ...”

“... on the shutter and it is thrown open, light floods in, there is the sudden roar of the crowd. Charles I steps out onto the scaffold. 30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on ...”

“... Al Capone, Humphrey Bogart, J. Edgar Hoover, William S. Burroughs, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Depp – might all be considered unwitting imitators of Sarah Bernhardt.) 5. The Rampant (er … ) Erotomania. (One moment, Herr Doktor – cough cough – my throat is tickling me.) World famous by her late twenties, Bernhardt slept with ...”

“... Mann seems to believe, stems from a fatal self-misunderstanding. He has in mind the boast of Charles Krauthammer and other neo-con ideologues that the US today is the most powerful polity in history. With bases in 132 countries, America has ‘the first military force deployable over the entire world’. Moreover, since 1991, it has had no ...”

“... back story, a baleful one, sheds some light here, both on the vicissitudes of the career and the frank titillations of style. Like other taboo-breaking writers – D.H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath come to mind – Hutchins seems to have written for some fairly unpleasant emotional reasons, and the wish to mortify her nearest and dearest was no doubt among ...”

“... them had been in his room ‘madly writing’, ‘they thought it would be very pleasant to give frank expression to the lack of it.’ It was decided that as a game they should each compose a piece in the style of another brother, with Minnie as the judge. Fred recounted the occasion: Arthur … had been studying The Light Invisible by Hugh, and he laughed ...”

“... my toughest competitor – if not in content, only in style?’ he asked. ‘Prince Charles,’ he answered. ‘I’m thinking of becoming an entertainer,’ he also said. ‘Liza Minnelli gets $75,000 a night to sing, and I’m really curious as to how I would do.’ ‘Yes,’ Andersen wrote, ‘in the blockbuster 1999: Casinos of the Third ...”

“... calls, tactfully enough, ‘a carefully arranged life of the senses’. All three enjoyed the frank and gilded perquisites of money and class. Even the fashion writer Madge Garland, embarrassed by her provincial Australian roots and the only one of the three who really had to work for a living, might be described as aristocratic-by-default, in the same ...”