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“... painful In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) to the working-class soap Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1973) and the TV variety show Like a Bird on a Wire (1975). It is an oeuvre so vast that Penman calls it ‘an entire town, region, conurbation, country; die Fassbinderrepublik’. Its revolving cast of actors and the alternately sickly sweet and dissonant ...”

“... Koss has no time to stop and help you. Matters become easier as the book approaches the present day. This is partly, of course, because Koss is moving into the zone lit up by our own memories. But I think it is also because his own herdsmanship improves: he writes with even more spirit and bite, and expresses more opinions. Perhaps, as he nears the ...”

“... At the height of his passion for Ottoline Morrell, he wrote her three or more times a day: on a train journey to stay with the mathematician A. N. Whitehead in the West Country, he posted one letter at Reading and another at Marlborough, before writing another from the Whitehead’s house. Admittedly that was shortly after he had celebrated ...”

“... two of the eight men in the room. A third died on the way to hospital. Two more died the following day. But of the three survivors, two had not even lost consciousness. The last was out of hospital after 19 days. Zuckerman understood something that the Germans did not understand: that casualties varied inversely according to the size of the weapon. Ton for ...”

“... archive, after Shakespeare and Freud. Here Karl Miller’s memories of the paper in her day are accompanied by extracts from some of the pieces published at the time. On the morning Margaret Thatcher’s death was announced, the lesser lights of television who were minding the shop did her proud. A river of bittersweet hyperbole flowed by, as the ...”

“... story sense’. He had developed the habit of going to the movies every day after he was fired from Mother Jones. More startlingly, this lumbering man had what it took to be a movie star. Rafferty had advised him it would be ‘absolutely a mistake to put himself in the film, that it wouldn’t work. It was the worst piece of advice ...”

“... officials to be trained in Singapore, but Peter Sloterdijk’s line that statues of Mao will one day be replaced with ones of LKY now seems a dated exuberance. The meritocratic ideology of Singapore has begun to show signs of wear, and its elite seems incapable of regenerating itself as that of the PRC does. Lee’s pioneer generation – the ‘Men in ...”

“... eyes shine.’ The same man also advised him to ‘step up production to, ideally, a picture a day’. His early paintings, Feaver writes, are ‘naive in that they appear untouched by, indeed oblivious to, academic discipline’. Over the next few years, as he moved around London, enjoying its pleasures, he spoke of himself as a painter. Later he ...”

“... sitting at the next table. She rushed over and did the Heimlich manoeuvre and saved his life. Next day the headline read: Barbra Streisand Takes the Food Right Out of a Person’s Mouth.’ Streisand repeats the joke in her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, to explain why she felt a ‘certain kinship’ with Bill Clinton during his presidency. ‘People can ...”

“... for a job in Oxford’s geography department wasn’t idle: in a recent essay in the Times, Douglas Murray, a director of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, took as a sign of our putative crisis over free speech the difficulty someone who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked ...”

“... its own specification for a ‘machine-gun destroyer’ to the Landships Committee. That same day, a demonstration of a tracked Killen-Strait tractor crossing various obstacles was held at Wembley Park for the benefit of Churchill and Lloyd George. It led to a decision to shift responsibility for the Landships Committee from the Admiralty to Lloyd ...”

“... the Middle East’, as Churchill had put it in 1940, receded from view until the dramas of the Six Day War in 1967, the next war in 1973, and the oil crisis. This had a direct impact on British politics, leading to Harold Wilson’s return to Downing Street in 1974. He resigned two years later in a miasma of dark suspicion, not much brightened by his ...”

“... even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine Whitehorn, Polly Toynbee, Nancy Spain, Helen Gurley Brown. Agony aunts get an even rawer deal: Marje Proops, Anne Landers and Dear Abby are ...”

“... and made appear /Her neck refulgent’. He greatly preferred the 16th-century Scots of Gavin Douglas: ‘Her nek schane like unto the rois in May.’ The rose in Virgil’s ‘rosea’ is completely suppressed in the marmoreal pallor of Dryden’s language, but the real offence is that ‘refulgent’. ‘Refulgent’ in English is ponderously ...”

“... of the romance of the isolated outsider. Praising his performance in Sands of Iwo Jima, General Douglas Mac Arthur (whose words had opened and closed John Wayne’s Bataan/Corregidor film, They Were Expendable), told him in front of the American Legion: ‘You represent the American serviceman better than the American serviceman himself.’ So saturated ...”