“... not walk-outs) got him down, but he didn’t mind the critics. When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave Lost Highway (1997) ‘two thumbs down!’, he quoted them on the poster as ‘two more great reasons’ to see the film. (Ebert often emerges as the arch-loser of the Lynch story, sulkily admitting that he felt ‘jerked around’ by the ...”

“... over; this is just the way things are, straightforward common sense. Dressed in military gear too young for him – helmet, camouflaged parka and pouches stuffed with automatic rifle magazines, gun slung over his shoulder, thumbs tucked into the front plate of his flak jacket as he rocks to and fro in the cold – he discusses the war in the tones of a ...”

“... sort, he soaked himself in opera, and grew confident, though possibly no more than many other young men, of some sort of future greatness. At 20, having moved with the family to London, he was ghosting music criticism for Lee and writing stories, book reviews and part of a play about Jesus. The ‘pale, private Shaw’ he then was decided to be a ...”

“... been built up is really adequate to the issues at stake. Conservative writers like David Watkin, Roger Scruton and, to a lesser extent recently, Gavin Stamp have worked with impressive zeal to see that every wretched tower block in the land is listed as a national monument to the reforming ambitions of 1945. They have also presented themselves as defenders ...”

“... counsel, Robert Mueller, has stayed on course, and on 25 January another close associate of Trump, Roger Stone, who professed to have advance knowledge of a WikiLeaks release of the DNC documents, was arrested in Fort Lauderdale. Stone is charged with seven felonies, including lying to the FBI, lying to Congress and witness tampering. His alleged collaborators ...”

“... advantages of private schooling and Princeton when the latter was still partly a drinking club for young Southern gentlemen. He attributed his own widened social sympathies to his service as a private in the US medical corps in France in 1917-18, though in later life the manners and attachments of his class were what struck younger observers. It had been clear ...”

“... if I was talking about someone else’s parents, not ours. Not his.’In those days, when we were young, most things weren’t strange. It wasn’t strange that our mother told her three children we couldn’t call her anything but ‘Mother’ (‘Mummy’ was the sole exception) and our dad anything but ‘Father’, even when this made us sound like ...”

“... of sociology as a discipline, Auguste Comte, inspired the founders of the Republic, firing young officers to overthrow the Empire in 1889 and bequeathing the motto – Ordem e Progresso – that still unfurls across the national flag. A century later, on the same soil, Comte’s dream of the sociologist-ruler seems to have come true. There ...”

“... Four years later, during rehearsals for a revival of the first production, one of von Bülow’s young assistants had a mental breakdown, apparently brought on by the opera, and was institutionalised. In 1911, Felix Mottl collapsed and died while conducting Tristan and Joseph Keilberth met the same end in 1968.We enjoy the stories about Tristan und Isolde ...”

“... at Sobibor on 9 July 1943. Gunther fell between the stools of eligibility for reparations: too young for a profession, he couldn’t get reparations for his career being interrupted; being between high school and university when the war began, he couldn’t argue that his studies had been interrupted.My grandmother never quite believed that her daughter ...”

“... posing as a die-hard fan (in some versions of the story she leaped out of a giant birthday cake). Roger Edens, an MGM composer who was Garland’s music coach, and perhaps the most important artistic influence on her career, had written a new arrangement of the song (which was twenty years old). ‘Dear Mr Gable,’ Garland sings,I am writing this to youAnd I ...”

“... Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a teenage racist. He says it was all schoolboy high jinks. Given that this was the late 1970s, it is ...”

“... The main difficulty, as I see it, is that, as Professor Robert Reiner pointed out a decade ago, young Afro-Caribbean males are likely to become disproportionately involved in street crime since they are, as we know, disadvantaged in employment, housing and education, and they are bound, therefore, to be more often the targets of aggressive policing. The two ...”

“... of British intellectuals who have thought themselves above expressing national pride. A young academic (in his mid-thirties), he belongs to a generation which has become alert to the political importance of patriotism and which takes Britain’s European future pretty much for granted. His enjoyable tour through the past sixty years stops at the ...”

“... knows about violence. She was born in Soweto, in a family of ten children, four of whom died young, one of them stabbed to death by unknown perpetrators when he was 21. As with many characters in this story, Judge Masipa’s life has followed violence from apartheid to its aftermath, and is revealing of the reality of South Africa’s hidden and unhidden ...”