“... Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) is the most recognisable, though I prefer Myrtle Gordon in John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977). Myrtle, played by Gena Rowlands, is in the twilight of her career and bent on sabotaging the play for which she’s currently rehearsing. She drinks too much; is haunted by a woman with a striking resemblance to her ...”

“... He next set his sights on the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, courted by its director, John Walker, with plans for a new building and murmurs of favourable tax rates. In 1949 and 1950, Gulbenkian sent a selection of his paintings to Washington, together with his Egyptian collection, which had been on loan to the British Museum since the 1930s. The ...”

“... a dividing line between the fiscal responsibility of our party and the reckless promises of John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn?’ Four years ago in these pages I warned that the government’s plans to bring down the headline debt figure through asset sales, including the sale of part of the student loan book, would mean a loss of millions of pounds to ...”

“... grievances; an antipathy to supranational governance and political correctness. These John Bullish attitudes seem far removed from the polite Europhile paternalism we tend to associate with one-nation Conservatives.Johnson has some similar attitudes, and has a following of scary nationalists on the Tory right, but he is careful to keep a foot ...”

“... her ‘reckless rustle over depths and difficulties’, which was very like a man to think.)When John Blackwood, who was publishing Miss Marjoribanks in serial in his magazine, taxed Oliphant with making Lucilla too ‘hard’, she responded: ‘I have a weakness for Lucilla, and to bring a sudden change upon her character and break her down into tenderness ...”

“... the horror. No sooner had Scotland failed to qualify than I was moved to treat my friends to John Steinbeck’s comment to Jacqueline Kennedy: ‘You talked of Scotland as a lost cause,’ he said, ‘and that is not true. Scotland is an unwon cause.’ Bloody hell. Better make mine a double. Five minutes later I was thinking about Ireland and five ...”

“... of this kind – to a new style not of life but of decoration – can be seen in the paintings of John Frederick Lewis. Yeazell gives more space to reproductions of his paintings and drawings than to those by Ingres or Delacroix, and with reason: Lewis, who lived in the Ottoman quarter of Cairo from 1841 to 1851, was formidably industrious and his drawings of ...”

“... critics. Happily, such praise was soon forthcoming – the Fugitives included future eminents like John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren in addition to the usual line-up of duffers – and the group’s magazine, the Fugitive, was widely welcomed as the voice of a significant new literary movement. This was a period when every new movement was deemed to be ...”

“... box (or Rubik’s Cube). The three barbicans that command the points of the V are House of Fraser, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer. There is an upper and a lower mall. The temperature is unnatural; so temperate that it drives you mad. You can’t sweat. You’re blow-dried. You can’t breathe. Air is recycled as in an airliner. You’re supposed to make those ...”

“... Venetian Bleeding Glass, a late 19th-century paean to this vanishing tradition of extravagance, John Freeman Knott, a Dublin doctor, mourns the passing of such times, which he calls the ‘primrose days of phlebotomy’. The consultant explained that the collection tubes are pre-filled with different chemicals, which allow the blood to be kept in the ideal ...”

“... their work, especially when it manifested itself as self-conscious ordinariness in poets such as John Masefield and Wilfred Gibson. Thomas felt that trying to be down to earth was part of the same problem; instead he wanted a poetry whose interplay of self-expression and common forms would always make it mean more than the writer could choose or control ...”

“... in Reich’s work its ideological justification, and he once referred to himself as Reich’s ‘John the Baptist’. His many books are littered with references to Reich’s concepts of ‘character armour’ and ‘self-regulation’. Reich, in turn, saw Neill’s project as a practical test of his ideas, and he sent his own son to Summerhill for a ...”

“... For more than a generation, what Europeans call social democracy and what Americans call liberalism has been the dominant political creed of the North Atlantic world. Its achievements have been enormous. As Ralf Dahrendorf points out in his important and persuasive pamphlet, ‘After Social Democracy’,* ‘it has turned the empty promise of freedom of contract into effective citizenship rights; the welfare state lies at the heart of social democratic politics ...”

“... effort of honesty and rationality seems to be needed – but the problem is so fantasy-ridden. John Updike’s story ‘Transaction’ in his latest book of short stories shows the prostitution bargain from the side of the male partner: his confusion about her blank availability and boredom, his attempts both to reach her as a real person and to use her in ...”

“... 1957 the search for a pay policy intensified. Comparability became more and more of a problem; Sir John Cameron, adjudicating a railway pay claim, declared that the nation ‘having willed the end, the nation must will the means’; it was not an answer any government could for long accept. Government’s increasing concern with wages was accompanied by the ...”