“... Having seen the TV programme on which it was based I’ve been reading Britten’s Children by John Bridcut. Glamorous though he must have been and a superb teacher, I find Britten a difficult man to like. He had his favourites, children and adults, but both Britten and Pears were notorious for cutting people out of their lives (Eric Crozier is mentioned ...”

“... it’s being republished now with the open aim of reaching the sizeable audience that resurrected John Williams’s Stoner and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. All three books share an interest in sad marriages and a certain amount of diffuse self-pity, but strenuous Flaubertian realism as practised on a mid-20th-century American campus, provided in ...”

“... opera buffa that keeps delivering.As well as Epstein and Maxwell it can offer such bit players as John Bryan; Steve Wyatt, ‘a hunky Texan oilman’, and his biological father, Bobby Lipman (who killed a young woman while tripping); Ruth, Lady Fermoy; Major Ron Ferguson’s loyalty to the Wigmore Club (a massage parlour); the queen mother’s lodged ...”

“... supporters seem to see limits to liberalism. On 20 February the Free Church Daily Mail columnist John MacLeod tweeted that ‘Kate Forbes was thrown untold gotcha questions today about same-sex marriage etc, but handled them well. I unaccountably missed all the interviews when Humza Yousaf was asked about how he felt about suicide-bombers and the sort of ...”

“... foreign to Erasmus’s own style: ‘Holy Father’, for ‘Summus Pontifex’ or ‘Father’ John Fisher for ‘R.P. Johannes Phischerius’. Foreign, too, is the Anglican ring of ‘My Lord Bishop’ (for ‘Reverendissime Praesul’). Saddest of all, that syncretism which led pious Renaissance Christians to apply to God the revered titles of Antiquity ...”

“... what amounts to the same schedule of risks. This spells a bad day for the project pioneered by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in the mid-20th century, of creating univocal preference functions for individual economic actors based on their revealed preferences. Someone who prefers one outcome to another when it’s presented in one way, but reverses ...”

“... striking attitudes with the duff public art we passed along the way. Our most love to loathe is John Ravera’s In Town, an anodised couple chucking their malshapen baby between them, which stands at the southern end of Battersea Bridge. We stopped at a vintage comic store in Putney where the proprietor, although a ringer for Comic Book ...”

“... back on stage a year later and complained he had lost ‘$35 million in an hour’. The journalist John Hockenberry was fired from New York Public Radio when old allegations of workplace bullying were suddenly deemed sufficient. This happened just before an article about his sexual behaviour was published. He is one of the few men who have attempted to write ...”

“... The Stud and Confessions of a Sex Maniac. Hodge had a colourful line in ex-boyfriends, including John Bindon, an actor-gangster who had holidayed with Princess Margaret and was tried for murder. The days of wine and roses for the pre-hyphenated Windsors left a few stains on the carpet, but the royals still acted as if they were beyond reproach.Mummy loved ...”

“... a red herring.’ Hitchcock plays on Grant’s innate smooth/twitchy quality (normal, good-looking guy makes small but lethal mistakes) and widens it, makes that image of Grant stand for something like the causality of the film, almost turns his nature into a plot device. This is perfectly illustrated by the alien suit: it emphasises an awkwardness which is ...”

“... coal-owner’s estate in Lawrence to David Storey’s Radcliffe and homoerotic fumblings among the guy ropes. There is the same smack of Mosleyite fellow-travelling that Ishiguro exploits in The Remains of the Day. ‘Stand in the snug every Sunday after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about National Socialism.’ Wodehouse revised by James ...”

“... With the introduction of the private detective film four years later, the other noir founders, John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, shifted audience identification from hunted to hunter. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon made Bogart a star, although the refugee Peter Lorre provides the film’s only moment of genuine fright Wilder, the ...”

“... her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and ...”

“... himself with a friend, surf journalist Marcus Sanders. Their translation is into the vernacular of guy inarticulateness, with a little slang, which is to say its frequent awfulness must be intentional. Throughout most of the English-speaking world, citizens speak English like, well, native speakers, and the ability to speak well is a pleasure and a power. But ...”

“... steals The Magnificent Seven not through hat-waving and underplaying, but because he laid siege to John Sturges to persuade him to increase the size of his role, and was charming and animated on-screen while everyone else was busy being dour. Charles Bronson and James Coburn were underplaying each other into inanimacy; Brynner was playing Gary Cooper. McQueen ...”