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“... to the William Morris Agency. Standing in his office are Jerry and Joe – Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis – a bass and a saxophone player. Jerry tries to persuade Poliakoff to give them the job – three weeks in Florida with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators – but Poliakoff tells them to beat it, they require female musicians. ‘Look, if William ...”

“... For Adults to Help Children Deal with Death, Divorce, Pet Loss, Moving and Other Losses by John James and Russell Friedman, and Bodylove: Learning to Like Our Looks and Ourselves: A Practical Guide for Women by the punctuation-crazed Rita Freedman. Publishing houses in New York, busy, as usual, looking for the hot new writing talent, will expect to find it ...”

“... burning down Japanese cities. The strategy had been adopted by his subordinate commander, Curtis LeMay, after earlier attempts to precision-bomb military targets from a high altitude, for which the B-29 bomber had been developed at enormous cost (more than the Manhattan Project), had utterly failed. In March 1945 a fire raid on Tokyo by B-29s ...”

“... perimeter fence of a US airbase and had already been inspected a couple of years before by John Curtis of the British Museum; Margarete van Ess of the German Archaeological Institute knew that a second site, Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh, had been kept intact by its guards, whom she had continued to pay; and a third site, Lagash, was intact in 2003 when I ...”

“... the term “conspiracy theory” or “new world order” etc.’ He read George Monbiot and Mark Curtis and took away the lesson that whoever is in power in the US and Britain carries out the same policies.Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse was his gateway to another world. To me – and I would have imagined before this to anyone – the works of radical social ...”

“... its own misdeeds on the Communists, and this attribution was widely accepted in the West. When James Cameron tried to write about Rhee’s atrocities for Picture Post, his report was suppressed. The declassified files in the PRO show the British Government making very feeble gestures to dissuade Rhee from atrocities. The British officials seem to have had ...”

“... fans of Ian Fleming’s novels, and thought the key CIA operative pushing for action in Cuba a James Bond-like figure. This fondness for swashbuckling characters was to bring the Kennedys to grief more than once. As Dallek tells it, the debacle upset Kennedy far more than was known at the time. Jackie told Kennedy’s mother that Jack ‘was so upset’ he ...”

“... Tailor – ‘a device so simple that it left him genuinely elated by its symmetry’. Clive James, writing in 1977, had similar feelings about the ‘symmetrical economy’ of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered ...”

“... Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a funny way to ...”

“... belonging to Princess Diana that sold for £222,500 in June 1997. The actor and peroxophile Tony Curtis, who must have forgotten that he once said kissing Marilyn was like kissing Hitler, got out of his seat at the auction to tell reporters that Marilyn would have been thrilled. ‘She’d have enjoyed the fact that people still love her so much,’ he ...”

“... No woman on earth, she complained, would be so dumb as not to see that the two drag artists, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, were men (the director, Billy Wilder, clearly agreed with her, filming in black and white: colour would have been a giveaway). Monroe was a would-be breakout artist. ‘If I hadn’t become popular,’ she said to Weatherby, ‘I’d still ...”

“... that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased with the beaux-arts plan that defines the placing of skyscrapers around ...”

“... with a discussion of Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s film from 2006, adapted from a P.D. James novel, set in a near-future Britain of caged refugees and cheap euthanasia, a world in which no children have been born for a generation. As Fisher says, this dystopia extrapolates only a little: I watched the film myself the other day to check I’d ...”

“... as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot down. Then there was the dream I had in which a snatched photo of the Trump-puff briefing notes of the former White House press secretary ...”