“... and Upton Sinclair is running as a socialist for governor of California against the Republican Frank Merriam. Merriam is strongly supported by certain sections of Hollywood, led by Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM. Mank, of course, is an old-fashioned leftie – really old-fashioned, the kind that didn’t turn to Stalin. He explains to MGM’s Irving Thalberg ...”

“... when Boswell pays an early visit to Bolt Court and Johnson barks ‘briskly’ from his bed: ‘Frank, go and get coffee and let us breakfast in splendour.’ And he is there late at night, when Boswell is too tired and tanked-up and talked-out to go back to his lodgings, and is settled into the spare room ‘by honest Francis with a most civil ...”

“... at the time of its submission a Syndic of the Press, and Watson was very rude to me, the publisher Michael Black preferred not to submit a proposal to the Syndicate. I hope and believe this is not true, and that Black, a serious Leavisian with whom I was quite genially associated for a good many years, knew me well enough to understand that such a ...”

“... come? There is an eerie underlining of the question in the fact that John Badham’s Dracula, with Frank Langella in the titular role, also appeared in 1979. But Langella is all charm, as Bela Lugosi (1931), Christopher Lee (1958 and six other years) and Gary Oldman (1992) also were in their way: hard to imagine them out of evening dress, aristocrats after ...”

“... a vast chequered board by the sea, with gothic ruins conveniently to hand, we know we’re not in Frank L. Baum any longer. We’re in Bergman’s Seventh Seal, reworked as an echo of a computer game. And we are, curiously, a little closer to Carroll than we were a few moments ago. Death is bound to show up around ...”

“... been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ...”

“... Michael Hofmann’s poetry is a lament for a lost world. Some years ago, in an article on Frank O’Hara, he talked about New York no longer being the thrilling place it had been in the days when O’Hara and the gang could go downtown to the Blue Note and hear John Coltrane or uptown to hear Billie Holiday ...”

“... Gauci, a young girl whose Maltese father gambled away his Cardiff café on the day she was born. Frank Gauci is a weak, compulsive man who ignores the difficulties of his family and hides behind the pages of the Sporting Life. Azzopardi has a keen sense of the shame of poverty and the humiliation of having to make do; the novel’s wide-eyed ...”

“... in 1974, Gunn met Ty’s ‘gorgeous big’ doorman, Allan Noseworthy. He was warm, generous, frank, fun, a voracious reader and a hopeless romantic. He wrote to Gunn of one guy: ‘I’ve found myself thinking about him 18 hrs a day (the six that I don’t are when I’m reading).’ Gunn found Noseworthyflighty, highly strung, at times silly, but so ...”

“... music and painting with mathematics, economics and philosophy, the person you end up with is Frank Plumpton Ramsey. A fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, Ramsey was born in 1903 and died before he turned 27, having done extraordinary work in all three fields. He is revered by academics, his influence evinced by the almost comical range of ideas named ...”

“... and the rot runs deep, not only in Liverpool and London, but in other big cities too. Read Michael Crick if you need convincing – and he is concerned only with Militant’s structure within the Labour Party: The March of Militant3 is a brilliant piece of detective work, cool and dispassionate. How will the political future look from Kilroy’s new ...”

“... This movie version of the play will just about do. It has most of the virtues and most of the faults endemic to such ventures, but it exposes the latter less grossly than some. As Shylock Pacino succeeds as any good, experienced actor should, and Jeremy Irons is appallingly sad as Antonio, just as he promises to be in the opening line of the play. He cannot understand why he is so sad but the film all too insistently offers a complete explanation ...”

“... this effect visually throughout the film by an odd, veiled gaze which intermittently converts her frank and often beautiful face into a mask of near idiocy, as if she is not only innocent but not quite right in the head. It’s a good thing she doesn’t understand what has happened, since Maxim married her as a little girl lost in the South of France, and ...”

“... K in a search for Deckard, who is holed up in a ruined hotel full of holograms of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and other heroes. After some serious mutual slugging that would have killed lesser replicants several times over, K and Deckard become fast friends. Round about here the old and new films meet up neatly and then part company. Both are interested in ...”

“... with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, George Cukor’s in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, Frank Pierson’s in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and Cooper’s now with himself and Lady Gaga, alias Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – are remarkably faithful to their initial premise and themes. They are about ...”