“... has not been to bed with. Such a pity.’ She cannot, however, be expected to reproduce what Edith Olivier said of him in the Twenties: ‘Willy looks a pitiable little cad-and a diseased one too – rather like a maggot.’ Laurence Whistler, in his biography of Rex Whistler, hastily excuses this stab from the Wiltshire ...”

“... neatly inserted Ray Peters’s surname at the first mention in the London Library copy).In 2004 Olivier Bell, Quentin Bell’s widow, asked Stansky how he felt about there being a new Life of Julian: Patricia Laurence, author of Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, had expressed an interest. Stansky, no doubt influenced by a ...”

“... theatrical visits, starting in 1935 with Maurice Evans in Hamlet at the Old Vic, followed there by Laurence Olivier in Macbeth and, at the Golders Green Hippodrome, by John Gielgud in Richard II. I was also taken to things picked out by myself: the Crazy Gang in OK for Sound at the London Palladium and Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, after I had heard ...”

“... London, creating a sensation as a theatre critic, he’s as trim, sleek and transparently avid as Laurence Harvey on the make in Room at the Top, but more convivial and amused – an amiable shark. No one looks that eagerly young anymore. Two decades after his death, Tynan is still getting the star treatment, a rare thing for any writer; even rarer for a ...”

“... is already raging when he arrives to introduce himself as the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange. Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff, back to a blazing fire, brims with disobligingness. Still, he agrees to accommodate the visitor. Lockwood petitions meekly for a cup of tea. Then things start to move quickly. Joseph, the servant, conducts him to an upstairs ...”