“... held it back for three or four years) encouraged a spate of ‘grimly honest’ realist dramas. As Graham Greene remarked of one of them, the colliery winding gear, silhouetted against the sky, the pit disaster and the warning siren became as cinematically familiar as the Eiffel Tower or the Houses of Parliament. A.J. Cronin, the best-selling novelist whose ...”

“... a Marxist disciple of Berger’s and was converted to Civilisation by Berger’s bête noire, Lord Clark. There is much debate about how right-wing Fuller has become. In some not specifically political respects, he is proud to be a reactionary, but he has never ceased to express his distaste for the present government and makes some effective polemical points ...”

“... the grave. Waiting in the wings is a book by him about Ursula, entitled Style, which, according to Graham Greene, who was sent the manuscript, might be edited for publication. There may be a cult in the making – and one could imagine a film by Antonioni, whose scriptwriter, Mark Peploe, was intrigued by J. Behrens in his last days. Ursula’s life resembles ...”

“... is being recognised? Of course, better things do happen in phone booths, at least in fiction. Clark Kent and Dr Who regularly disappear into booths maintained to high standards of hygiene in order to pick up where they left off as extra-terrestrials. The time-travelling booth that launched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) had a curious ...”

“... of defense Robert Gates, the vice president Joseph Biden and the former Nato commander Wesley Clark were all opposed, while Clinton, the UN ambassador Susan Rice and national security council aide Samantha Power urged action. Obama was typically reluctant to commit either way. There were good reasons for caution. The biggest problem was the ambiguity of ...”

“... He uses his extensive interviews with Freud subtly and judiciously. In 1945, when Freud asked Graham Sutherland who the greatest painter in England was, Sutherland responded: ‘Oh, someone you’ve never heard of: he’s like a cross between Vuillard and Picasso; he’s never shown and he has the most extraordinary life.’ He was referring to Francis ...”

“... because I had moved left.’ Thus Matthiessen set the stage for himself to become the Ramsey Clark of American letters, an establishment figure who would come to the defence of enemies of the regime: from endangered wild species to the Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of the murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge ...”

“... streets of Cinco de Mayo and Francisco Madero: quieter, more humdrum. It was like this when Graham Greene passed through in the 1930s, the street ‘where you can buy your clothes cheaper if you don’t care much for appearances’.In mid-January, Loy arrived in Mexico City, and there they were married on 25 January 1918. ‘We left the town ...”

“... person is not black, it still plays its part. McFeely quotes the former Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s impassioned plea in a Federal court for the life of John Spenkelink, the first person in line for execution under the new laws passed to meet the Supreme Court’s objections in the Furman decision: because Spenkelink was white, his death, according to ...”

“... anti-Communist nation. Documentation of these murky activities is predictably scarce, but we have Graham Greene’s fictional account, The Quiet American, originally published in 1955, the insights in which still bite. Greene’s narrator, Thomas Fowler, a cynical British journalist who smokes opium, keeps a teenage Vietnamese mistress named Phuong and sounds ...”