“... showmen,’ she replied. ‘In even their most carefree moments and their most abandoned moods,’ James Thurber noted, ‘there was scarcely ever the casual ring of authentic gaiety. They did not know how to invite gaiety. They twisted its arm, got it down, and sat on its chest.’An early short story, ‘Winter Dreams’, from the collection All the Sad ...”

“... translation, and like many people really did think of it as the standard edition. Like the King James Bible, if I can use that unfortunate analogy, it is so good – or we have been so educated to see its goodness – that it seems like the real thing. It’s true that I wondered, when Penguin first phoned me, whether Freud sounded different in other ...”

“... turned out to be an abortive attempt to raise an 11-ton section of the hull. The movie director James Cameron, fascinated with what he called the Everest of wrecks, filmed a dive that became part of his blockbuster 1997 movie (the footage was recently repurposed for a documentary). The new 3D version of the movie released in time for the centenary took its ...”

“... the Mail. It was first put on in 1980, and while generally enthusiastic the Mail assumes, as did James Fenton at the time of the first production, that by putting the main young man in drag I am signalling my own (presumably suppressed) desire to get into a frock. It may be that the Mail assumes all homosexuals would like to be in skirts (or ought to ...”

“... annual showpiece. Inside the Brighton Centre, a hulking, rather worn building which was opened by James Callaghan in September 1977, shortly before the close working relationship between unions and Labour governments collapsed, seemingly for good, the conference hall was quiet and two-thirds full. The upstairs galleries had been curtained off, and an audience ...”

“... intimate occasions of which this is not true.)’ In the jacket photograph she was decked out as James Joyce, with a felt-tip monocle over one eye. ‘The picture of you on the back rather turns my head,’ Murdoch wrote. ‘You dazzling creature.’ (Years later, she tried a new tack: ‘I am not a great writer. Neither are you.’)After Brophy’s first ...”

“... Kunkel found references to several possible projects: a big New York novel in the manner of James Joyce whom Mitchell admired above all other moderns; a life and times of a smart and funny woman who hung out with New Yorker writers and married one of them; a big personality piece about an Italian carter named Joe Cantalupo who was a fixture of the ...”

“... over the Rainbow’, and before long was singing Yip Harburg’s lyrics as well as Harold Arlen’s tune in live performances of ‘Starman’. In creating Ziggy Stardust, Bowie was acknowledging that it was no longer possible, if it ever had been, to make ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ rock’n’roll, especially if you were a skinny white ...”

“... the Attlee Government discouraged and resisted black immigration (though it didn’t suggest, as Harold Macmillan had during the war, that black Britons should be issued with Union Jack badges). After 1945 most recruitment drives were directed at Europeans; ministers even briefly considered moving the Windrush passengers on to East Kenya, to work on the ...”

“... fifty pages in, when she decides to audition for a talent contest at a nearby gay bar. She sang Harold Arlen’s ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’; when she had finished, ‘for a minute the whole room was silent. Then everyone burst into applause.’ She won the competition. Soon she was taken to the Bon Soir nightclub on Eighth Street for an audition. ‘It was the ...”

“... Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody ...”

“... shock of American desertion at Suez and the re-election in 1959 of a Conservative government under Harold Macmillan that this stance changed. By 1960, the poor performance of the British economy compared with those of the six countries that had created the European Economic Community (EEC) was plain and, strongly encouraged by the Kennedy administration in ...”

“... but the ranks of inscribed black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten ...”

“... purposes – had become the phrase du jour.Still, Brzezinski and the secretary of defence, Harold Brown, his closest ally in the administration, had a problem. Not only was the European public becoming more outspokenly opposed to nuclear weapons, but, as Luce writes, ‘Carter’s heart seemed to be with the protesters.’ Under pressure from ...”

“... be describing the work of Donald Davidson in philosophy of language, and of Nietzsche, Freud and Harold Bloom in moral psychology, as so many manifestations of a willingness to drop the idea of ‘intrinsic nature’, a willingness to face up to the contingency of the language we use. I shall try to show how a recognition of that contingency leads to a ...”