“... new collection of ephemera, Think, Write, Speak, Nabokov identifies that industrious interviewer, Alfred Appel, Jr, as ‘my pedant … Every writer should have such a pedant. He was a student of mine at Cornell and later he married a girl I’d taught at another time, and I understand that I was their first shared passion.’ Imagine it: erotic unification ...”

“... domestic abuse follows logically from the ability of soap opera to get inside people’s homes. Alfred Hitchcock praised TV for putting ‘murder back into the home where it belongs’. It is behind closed doors that violence takes place: the majority of victims are known to their abusers, and assault on the streets by a stranger, though it makes the ...”

“... the rivalry? Ostensibly it is all about one magician’s blunt invasion of the act of another. Alfred Borden, played by Christian Bale, wrecks a performance by Robert Angier, played by Hugh Jackman, with dire consequences: in the novel an abortion for Angier’s wife, in the movie the wife’s death. But this plausible bit of plotting very soon comes to ...”

“... a year Brian and Jean had begun their long sojourn in California, having been enticed there by Alfred Hitchcock, for whom Moore wrote the screenplay of Torn Curtain. (Moore, after all, knew much more about corpses than Hitchcock.) The California the Moores inhabited was an isolated stretch of coast at Malibu. Moore ...”

“... are now a canalside development with drizzling water-features and a giant boilerplated head of Alfred Hitchcock. The clunkiness of this heritage appropriation proves all too loudly that anywhere is everywhere. History is their story and not yours. When Mason performs his dying fall as a Byronic gunman, gate clutching, staggering across the snow ...”

“... of the conservatives was someone else whose name was indelibly associated with Wilde. Lord Alfred Douglas was by now the spitting image of his father: splenetic, reactionary, petulant and shrill. He had told Ross: ‘I no longer care to associate with persons like yourself who are engaged in the active performance and propaganda of every kind of ...”

“... Alfred Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange (1931) includes a quietly compelling scene set on a Tube train packed with office-weary commuters. The dim and sluggish hero finds himself standing next to an attractive blonde in a beret and white raincoat, whom he manages to ignore completely as he struggles to stay upright while unfurling his newspaper ...”

“... the Black Stone of Brexit, and a bit of Hannay in Johnson’s swagger. It can’t only be down to Hitchcock that The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print, or that most bookshops still stock The Complete Richard Hannay, with only the retro Orange Penguin livery to indicate that the contents are – as my grandmother would have put it – terribly ...”

“... a national cast in the Manifesto. From the Marquis de Sade through Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel, most of the antecedents he named were French, and he credited the ur-method of Surrealism to two compatriots, Isidore Ducasse (aka Lautréamont), whose line about ‘the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an ...”

“... was ‘Any Porch’, published by Vanity Fair in 1915, the same year that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ appeared in Poetry. Eliot may have identified the category of society women who come and go talking of Michelangelo, but it was Parker who, in nine meticulously metered and rhymed stanzas, provided the whole conversation.‘My husband ...”

“... which was in grey Cheviot tweed, the waistcoat of which I still have and which I took to show Mr Hitchcock at Anderson & Sheppard before they made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s 90 not looking much ...”