“... discourse, and they are often reactionary (and sometimes anti-semitic). But Gaddis is too smart to leave matters there. He is also fascinated by another Greek word, aporia, which he once defined as ‘difference, discontinuity, disparity, contradiction, discord, ambiguity, irony, paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy, chaos’, and saluted ...”

“... even if his compliments can take a bit of figuring out. Colleagues are often praised for being ‘smart enough to see the point’ of his directorial interventions; Jonathan Ross, ‘whose gifts I admired’, is said to ‘put a lot of emphasis on personal appearance, almost as if he had no talent’, though Terry Wogan and ...”

“... someone’s long lens and for whom blood is everything: the Windsors, aka the Firm. Tina Brown, a smart ethnographer bearing a scalpel, engages with this dispiriting bunch as though they, like the Rooneys of that photograph, have yet to evolve.The slice of world that is vouchsafed to the queen and her many dependants, to whom she doles out annual ...”

“... from the ill effects of African nationalism is, of course, simple-minded. The fact that all the ‘smart money’ is on Mbeki is actually the best possible reason for betting on Hani. The most active pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career ...”

“... struck him as ‘worth fighting for’. He ended up on the front in Aragon somewhat by chance. Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the British Communist Party, had flatly denied his request to join the International Brigades: his accent and background made him politically suspect. The International Labour Party had set up an office in Barcelona that ...”

“... preoccupied, chemically adapted as ever. They looked forward, impatiently, to the forthcoming Harry Potter, a device for blotting out the view from the window. A weapon, a comforting weight in the lap. Potter makes use of Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross: trainee wizards have to learn how to pass through the solid barriers between platforms 9 and 10. They ...”

“... were 267 shows on Broadway. The cultural mood was buoyant. Porter’s lyrics were no longer ‘too smart’ or too raffish for the cosmopolitan public.In its lavishness, the American musical traditionally made a myth of abundance – plenty in cap and bells. In the playful elegance of his word hoard, his proliferating wit and the lushness of his ...”

“... that the people involved were in love.’ Ryan, by contrast, had not only faked her orgasm in When Harry Met Sally (1989) but had also taken a couple of turns opposite Tom Hanks in romantic comedies, at a time when Hanks was becoming the biggest male movie star in the world, and done a widely admired emote-a-thon as an alcoholic in When a Man Loves a Woman ...”

“... Hopkins, who taught there. A propos Henry VII, what happened between 1485 and 1500? How did bold Harry Tudor of Bosworth Field turn into the crabbed penny-pinching accountant that is his usual representation? 24 March. A film beginning with a man being shepherded through a darkened hall; glimpses of paintings, a shaft of light on a plaster ceiling, the gleam ...”

“... not only Eddie Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker, but the future movie mogul Harry Cohn, the young Walter Winchell and his own older brother. Signed by the Shubert Brothers in 1911, Jolson was the first product of the bastard forms of vaudeville and minstrel show to be legitimised on Broadway’s Great White Way, where he addressed his ...”

“... whose wealthy but very dysfunctional family introduced what a later commentator called ‘a pretty smart touch of insanity’ into the Foote genes. His early years are typical enough of a spendthrift younger son battling his way out of provincial obscurity: a curtailed career at Oxford noted mainly for its bibulousness; a failed business venture in the ...”

“... legacy, after all. What Happens in Terry Stays in Terry. Emblazoned on the slip of paper was a Harry-Potterish list of aristocratic-sounding titles that Mavis seems to have invented for the three of us (me, my sister and herself) for reasons unknown. Honorifics one might call them, or perhaps, horrorifics. Now I should explain that in my mother’s eyes ...”

“... to give Feklisov a working proximity fuse, the crucial component in one of the world’s first ‘smart’ weapons, a precursor to the homing missile. (In 1960 one would help the Soviets bring down Gary Powers’s U2 plane.) Feklisov’s superiors were suspicious. The proximity fuse had cost a billion dollars to develop: you couldn’t just walk out of a ...”

“... O’Brien would, no doubt, be found listed in the morgue. Mister Smylie, who had been through this smart fandango more than once before retorted happily that ‘in that case’ he would like an obit of two hundred and fifty words on the great man for the city edition, and hung up. Unfortunately for the boy the only reporter available at that moment was a new ...”

“... phenomenon among American Presidents, and one about which they have tended to be sensitive. When Harry Truman was trying to persuade Adlai Stevenson to stand for the Presidency he had argued: ‘Adlai, if a knucklehead like me can be President and not do too badly, think what a really educated smart guy like you could do ...”