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“... Scrutons and it is not easy to reconcile them: barrister, aesthetician, champion of Senator Joseph McCarthy, teacher at Birkbeck College (an institution with a tradition of proletarian outreach), editor of the ultra-Tory Salisbury Review foxhunter. And novelist. Fortnight’s Anger (1981) was hard-going – a murky tale of adolescent sexuality full of ...”

“... the century – or at any rate its middle years. Johnson was also the architect of the space age: Tom Wolfe correctly makes him a central figure in The Right Stuff and it’s no accident that mission control is anchored in Houston. With the Great Society programme he forced a torrent of social and economic reforms through Congress – only FDR did anything ...”

“... telling examples. Mr Casaubon is selfish, Rosamond Vincy is selfish, her brother Fred is selfish, Tom Tulliver is selfish, Harold Transome is selfish, Esther Lyon starts out to be selfish but is saved in time by Felix Holt. On the other side of the ledger, Maggie Tulliver is unselfish, Mary Garth is unselfish, the Dissenting minister Rufus Lyon is a pillar of ...”

“... he wasn’t such a damn hick’. Hick or not, he was considered dangerous enough. He funded Joseph McCarthy, and Lyndon Johnson wasn’t joking when he told a colleague that he believed Hunt was responsible for inciting the riots in Newark and Detroit in 1964: he thought the tycoon was trying to derail the passage of civil rights legislation. Hunt launched an ...”

“... with W.C. Fields as Micawber; one of the worst, three years later, was a plodding Tom Sawyer. Was Selznick wary of greater challenges – Bleak House or Huckleberry Finn? When he tackled Anna Karenina, also in 1935, he turned it into a glossy vehicle for Garbo; and his very last film, A Farewell to Arms, was an over-reverent flop. The best ...”

“... by Anthony West, who lived in America but was temporarily in London. After depicting Senator McCarthy’s activities in America and exposing the potentialities and nonsense in the concept of security risk, West demonstrated that it was ‘this game’ that Harold Wilson, George Wigg (‘that industrious garbage collector’), Dick Crossman and ...”

“... remains unsolved. It is perhaps the lavish, accomplished and indefinably sinister illustrations by Tom Adams that make this so triumphantly a bumper book for buffs. Mr Adams’s portraits of the seven great detectives reappear as a circle of medallions on the dust-jacket. Thus synoptically viewed, they strike me, perplexedly, as patently criminal types. Ellery ...”

“... have a restored print of The Big Sleep, half an hour longer than the original; and, most recently, Tom Hiney’s Raymond Chandler, billed as the first ‘authorised’ biography in twenty years. Chandler would be amused by his power to authorise a biography from beyond the grave, but probably not so amused by the promise of ‘new material’ about the private ...”

“... we don’t know. Another reference: And there many have paused before that exposure of him by old Tom Quad, a flashback in which he sits sated, gowndabout, in clericalease habit, watching bland Sol slithe dodgsomely into the nethermore, a globule of maugdleness about to corrugitate his mild dewed cheek and the tata of a tiny victorienne, Alys, pressed by his ...”

“... uniform, and wore antique necklaces and jade earrings on the hospital ward. According to Mary McCarthy, her stories always contained the sentence: ‘And there I was in the fullest of full evening dress.’ She gravitated towards people who stood out, like Audrey in her ‘shivering apricot frock’ in Quicksand (the character was based on the Black ...”

“... of few words, invincible in gunplay, and a dispenser of Solomonic justice. As portrayed first by Tom Mix, then by Randolph Scott, the Lassiter type descends directly to Clint Eastwood. The last scene in Unforgiven (even down to the whipping) is the first scene of Riders of the Purple Sage. All that’s been added is a sadism which would have appalled ...”

“... He believes he can win her back through displays of wealth and manners, but she is now married to Tom Buchanan, an upper-class boor. Trump’s claim to have risen Gatsby-like is the opposite of Gatsby’s magical self-invention. Gatsby was careful to maintain the air of the gentleman he wished to be taken for. Trump is the uncouth son of privilege for ...”

“... the independent producer Walter Wanger to buy the rights to Howard Fast’s novel Citizen Tom Paine for him to direct and, as the FBI noted (they had a dossier on Welles), planned a series of educational short films on ‘minority problems’. The Stranger (1946) – a frankly commercial production which Welles made for another independent, Sam ...”

“... all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy’s fan letters complained of ‘red infiltration’; the rest fretted about ‘sex depravity’. The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with ...”

“... stoking public awareness. This all changed in 1988, the year Rain Man was released. In the film, Tom Cruise plays a callow grifter who kidnaps his autistic older brother – Dustin Hoffman in full Stanislavskian splendour – and takes him on a soul-enlarging road trip to Las Vegas. ‘In the year before the film came out,’ Silberman writes, ‘fewer than ...”