“... at a discount. And then I read a memorial interview with that old self-server and mass-murderer Robert McNamara. He recalled an occasion, quite early in the Lyndon Johnson presidency, when Jackie had come up to him at a reception in New York and beaten her fists on his chest, calling on him to stop the killing in Vietnam. Of course, one could object and say ...”

“... tackled two generations of remarkable Drysdales and their partners: George, his brother Charles Robert, the latter’s mistress and intellectual colleague Alice Vickery, their son Charles Vickery Drysdale, and his wife Bessie. And when I saw the proofs I realised that she had indeed researched her subject profoundly. Her discoveries about the personal life ...”

“... The Young Rebecca is a collection of the writings of Rebecca West from 1911 to 1917, selected and introduced by Jane Marcus, with just the right amount of explanation and comment. In one respect it is an unfortunate title, suggesting an item from the cast-list of almost any black-and-white film about almost any celebrity, but in the respect that it makes a point of Rebecca West’s youth, it is a good title ...”

“... is set in Florence, in the year 1855, and the narration takes the form of letters written by a young American, Robert Booth, to his friend Professor Prescott, an authority on Theoretical and Practical Ethics. Booth, in retreat from rejection in love and a sense of his own failure in literature, has known at least one ...”

“... at the suggestion of the ICA’ – where she is writer in residence – ‘I invited five bright, young writers with a healthy clutch of novels between them, all more or less friends of mine, to write stories of a pornographic nature for which they would receive £250 each.’ Direct, conversational, ‘honest’, and then there’s that studied mention of ...”

“... Carp (Prion, £8.99), but he is acknowledged on the title page, and his potted biography is in Robert Robinson’s introduction. Carp, unlike his author, has no pretensions to modesty: It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography, to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when ...”

“... When Robert Graves left Charterhouse School in 1914, the headmaster wrote in his report: ‘Well, goodbye, Graves and remember that your best friend is the wastepaper basket.’ (Charterhouse is the public school that was recently reported to be replacing its tuckshop with a branch of Starbucks, but in fact isn’t ...”

“... of exotic ‘prayer’ shawl draped over his expressive shoulders, smoking away, talking to eager young girls. Mike Nichols, the serpent in the garden … Claggart to the life, said not enough money was coming in just now, wanted to get unused to the money. Arthur Miller a bit tight addressing me as usual on the subject of his latest ...”

“... gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend ...”

“... when I was talking to her. The others were sent out to Kinko’s, and I was briefly alone. Then a young Asian man dressed in an immaculate grey suit and grey tie joined me. He was wearing a name tag that said ‘Kristina’. I asked him how he happened to be here. ‘I had a friend who worked there,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s no big deal ...”

“... to where I was in a way that my friends’ families didn’t’. The other three all died young of heroin overdoses. ‘Sonny doesn’t need drugs,’ Cliffy would say, ‘he’s high on himself!’Despite her love of cinema, his mother tried to protect him from an acting career, saying it wasn’t for poor people. Pacino squandered his first big ...”

“... Most of these are now in libraries in Texas. As early as 1934, Beasley’s original publisher, Robert McAlmon, was complaining that a rare book dealer was asking $40 for a copy of the book, which had been priced at $2.50. (Copies of the Texas Book Club edition occasionally surface, selling at $125 or higher.) The memoir recounts Beasley’s difficult ...”

“... of the original police investigations. The ‘Doctor’s Tale’ outlines the findings of the young – by Home Office pathologist standards – Dr Peter Acland, whose expert testimony (subsequently challenged by a more experienced Welsh pathologist) was somewhat undermined by an astonishing letter to the Times, in which he said: ‘I do not know who ...”

“... Donoughue from first page to last is anxious to impress us with the qualities of his colleagues. Robert Armstrong (yes, Robert Armstrong) was ‘warm, complex, sensitive – a marvellous team member’. Robin Butler was ‘the most outstanding civil servant with whom I ever had to deal’ (and, some ninety pages ...”

“... At long last, the Republicans would have made up for the devastating rejection of Robert Bork, who would now appear as an originalist prophet wrongly denied admission to the holy temple of the law. But it was not to be. 2005 was the year of the Iraq debacle, the Katrina fiasco, the DeLay scandal. The president’s challenge to Social Security ...”