“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have been writing. Some examples: ‘She had a face like an upturned canoe,’ said by the actor Charles Gray at breakfast in Dundee (though of whom I can’t remember). A. I’ve been salmon fishing. B. It’s not the season. A. No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig Two.’ Said by my mother when ...”

“... queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With Coward in the room ...”

“... were mostly old, and the Irish Parliamentary Party had never fully recovered from the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell. (Parnell, first elected to the House of Commons in 1875, and known for his charisma, cunning and strategic skills, was dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He was brought down in 1890, having been named by William O’Shea as ...”

“... primal scream (Spain 1982); Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ leap over Peter Shilton (Mexico 1986); Frank Rijkaard’s fleck of gob caught mid-parabola towards Rudi Völler’s perm, and Gazza’s tears, and Maradona’s tears (Italy 1990); Roberto Baggio’s penalty soaring over the bar (USA 1994); Zinedine Zidane walking past the trophy, head bowed, having ...”

“... is good enough to keep company with them to complete the shape.’ And two days later to wrote to Frank Morley: ‘My own suspicion about it is that it is a flop and that I shall have to put it aside and make a fresh start.’ In August, he wrote to another friend: ‘I have written a fourth poem to complete the series … but I am not satisfied with it, and ...”

“... by the greenhouse effect on earth. At the prompting of a geochemist and oceanographer called Charles David Keeling, the observatory of Mauna Loa on Hawaii had been collecting data on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1959. The result – the ‘Keeling curve’ – clearly showed that levels of atmospheric CO2 were rising sharply. In 1979, Jimmy ...”

“... front of our apartment, I was always jumping all over them in a passion.In Straight Life Pepper is frank – and hilarious – on the subject of his looks. Detailing his stay in an expensive detox sanitorium in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, he recalls prinking about in the nude after getting some huge shots of morphine to mitigate the symptoms of heroin ...”

“... Butt, who became a regular dinner guest at Wilde’s house in Westland Row, and the novelists Charles Lever and Sheridan Le Fanu. He also travelled to London and then to Vienna and Berlin to pursue his medical studies; he visited Prague, Munich and Brussels. In 1843 he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a ...”

“... son Isaac Butt Yeats. Among Yeats’s best friends at school were two brothers from Sligo, Charles and George Pollexfen, whose family owned a shipping and milling business. Yeats, who was charming and open in his manner, found their seriousness beguiling and made a visit to them in Sligo while at Trinity. The town of Sligo, he later wrote, ‘was ...”

“... indeed receive the royal nod. Instead, Roth chose Blake Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the ...”