“... Then it happened – not to Joan Didion, but to Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Boytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, and Sharon Tate: On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon ...”

“... also sees Lauren as a ‘movie-maker manqué’, whose designs for The Great Gatsby and Annie Hall exerted broad cultural influence. On the British side, McDowell praises Laura Ashley as the English counterpart of Ralph Lauren. ‘Her inspiration came from the lives of ordinary folk: Victorian schoolrooms and vicarages; the dress of countrywomen ...”

“... they needn’t waste their time asking if she believed in witchcraft. Thomson compares this with Steven Spielberg, who hired ‘a reliable UFO expert’ to advise him when making Close Encounters of the Third Kind. ‘And some asked Spielberg if he believed in unidentified flying objects. No, he replied, but I believe in people who believe in them.’ This ...”

“... book would have to be written on a laptop that had no internet access. When I arrived at Ellingham Hall Assange was fast asleep. He’d been living there, at the house of Vaughan Smith, one of his sureties and founder of the Frontline Club, since his arrest on Swedish rape allegations. He was effectively under house arrest and wearing an electronic tag on his ...”

“... dogs,’ a former neighbour of Zainab’s said. ‘Like, there was this guy on the 15th floor, Steven Power, he had two bull terriers, you know those dogs? Loved them, he did. Would’ve died for those two dogs.’ People in the tower would go round to Steven’s for a drink. Sometimes they sat together outside the ...”

“... was steep and swift, the tilled soil seen from the windows of the plane was red. In the arrivals hall, cocker spaniels swarmed over the luggage hunting for explosives. An official led us through immigration. We were introduced to the three people with whom we’d spend the next four days: a driver, a guide and a government official who looked as if he ...”

“... direct apology for boyhood’. So, too, with Watkins. If he has a contemporary analogue, it is Steven Spielberg in such nostalgic exercises as Young Sherlock Holmes and his homage to Treasure Island, Goonies. Like Stevenson, Spielberg raises the romp to an art form. The Promise of Light cries out for film adaptation. Its Hiberno-American theme suggests ...”

“... the presidency, he has been aggressively sold as the face of a new Egypt, in ‘Meet Gamal’ town-hall meetings, on billboards in Cairo, and on television. Now the third-ranking official in the NDP, Gamal has made a number of trips to Washington, fawningly covered by the state-run media, and been praised in the New York Times as an ‘intelligent, handsome ...”

“... Polmont on Sunday, 3 June, she was distraught. She told them there had been a big fight in the hall and she had been threatened. Linda alerted one of the prison officers. Someone spoke to Katie, but she wasn’t thought to be at risk of harming herself. At some point during the night, she hanged herself from a doorstop on her cell wall. A postmortem ...”

“... the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) and in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to ...”

“... programmes, but reached its climax in the cloning contests of reality TV. According to research by Steven Barnett, in 1955 the BBC devoted 10 per cent of its schedule to arts programmes and nearly 25 per cent to children. Over the course of the last decade, the time devoted to soaps has almost doubled (approaching 10 per cent of peak output), current affairs ...”

“... a sartorial victory for his class during an exchange of words with Jacqueline Kennedy in the hall of the spectacularly grand Manhattan apartment to which she moved after her husband’s assassination. They had become friendly in the course of earlier meetings, once at a state dinner in the White House and another time, while she was still First Lady, at ...”

“... At the University of Illinois in 2014, trustees voted to block the appointment of a new professor, Steven Salaita, after students and donors complained about his tweets criticising Israel. The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have donated huge sums to advance their project of converting university students to free-market fundamentalism and then ...”

“... Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her in dismissing the ‘ventriloquist structuralism’ that was in fashion at the time.)‘The Owl of Minerva has spread her wings,’ Rose wrote at the beginning of The Broken ...”