“... lot of baloney’ the latterday gossip that Rudy was a homosexual, angrily insisting: ‘He was a nice, normal human being.’ But he confirmed that – except when Rudy was with Natacha Rambova, the woman who became his second wife – Rudy seemed content with a passive stance when it came to actual sex. Not that we should trust Ivano as normalcy’s ...”

“... 2000, the same year as Mankell’s similarly themed The Return of the Dancing Master, so it’s a nice touch that Hole is briefly taken off the case and sent to fester in Wallander’s territory, a.k.a. ‘some godforsaken place in Sweden’. ‘In the detective story,’ Auden writes in ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, the setting should be the Great Good ...”

“... Dickie and Imelda are both aware that life can spring nasty surprises, often hard on the heels of nice ones, and the novel opens at a point when, having long since settled into a comfortable if joyless status quo, they are being reacquainted with this knowledge. The Bee Sting is about people not taking things quite seriously enough, or making decisions for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1%’ signs and shouting at the delegates: ‘Don’t look at me, you might catch poverty.’ David Brooks of the New York Times walked by. He always seemed to be walking by. A man pointed at the ‘Mr 1%’ sign and said: ‘That should be “Mr 0.001%”, thank you.’ They were considering a trip to a strip club to confront delegates about ‘issues ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... and, according to official figures, killed around 12,000 in combat, though the real figure, in David Anderson’s view, is ‘likely to have been more than 20,000’. In addition, Caroline Elkins claims, up to 100,000 died in the detention camps. It is the scale of the British atrocities in Kenya that is the most startling revelation of these books. We ...”

“... started to feel as if I really didn’t know what was going to happen next. Nazi-Soviet pact? Not nice, but perhaps it means we shan’t be having to fight an alliance of three Fascist powers, including Franco’s Spain. Churchill as prime minister? All very well, but some of us remember the Dardanelles – and besides, look at the people around him! To be ...”

“... but I have never seen it properly discussed or described. I don’t know what I am. Am I twice as nice? Am I twice as alive now as I ever was? On the Internet, I look up ‘HeLa’ on Yahoo and find, within minutes, that the woman’s name was Henrietta Lacks. So what is she missing, I wonder, what does Henrietta lack? What does she want now? I type her name ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... his celebrants were some of America’s most esteemed foreign reporters and analysts, including David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. But then, on 2 October last year, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and dismembered with a bone saw, causing outrage in the West. Even ...”

“... has doped out the long-odds favourite of Chico’s library, and in the meantime Chico has turned a nice profit betting on the horse Groucho wanted to bet on until he heard the fatal cry of ‘Get your tootsie-fruitsie ice cream.’ After A Day at the Races in 1937, the Marx Brothers movies came at long intervals, and most of the juice was gone. Yet Groucho’s ...”

“... there’s a good deal of hat-doffing before we process along to the west door of the chapel – a nice sight, I imagine, if one is lucky enough not to have a part to play. Various tourists take pictures.There’s not a soul in the ante-chapel as Richard LM had warned would be the case, though the chapel itself is full. Rupert is in the next stall and Rowan ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”