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“... master, Henri III, or to his own servants? He had been using the diplomatic bag, which passed from Paris through Salisbury Court to Sheffield, where Mary was in detention, if not to encourage then not necessarily to discourage the kinds of plot in which Throckmorton had been mixed up; and somebody on his payroll had shared this useful information with the ...”

“... 88 when its author died, and is 97 now. Still the books keep coming. This latest pair, by Barry Gewen and Thomas Schwartz, have moved beyond outrage to something more like bafflement, tinged with affection. Each begins with an effective admission of authorial uncertainty: why, they ask, am I writing about Henry Kissinger, when so much has been written ...”

“... lost original. The text’s effectiveness has been tested where it most counts, in the theatre, by Barry Kyle’s recent production at Stratford. This used the A-text, and an all-male ensemble, and achieved at least one moment of shock which nearly had me hastening for the doors like those terrified spectators in Exeter. Its virtues of pace and clarity are to ...”

“... derived from a keen appetite for fine food and wine indulged in during ‘lavish visits to Paris’. Haughey is compared to Hitler (for his relations with Iveagh House), to Nixon (for his phone-tapping), to Don Giovanni (for his swagger) and to royalty (for his ability to get people to serve him) – all in one paragraph. Elsewhere the ...”

“... Williams, but also to various editors and patrons: to the somewhat mysterious Margaret Cravens, a Paris-based piano student from Madison, Indiana, who in 1910 bestowed on Pound an annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two years later; to John Quinn, a lawyer and collector to whom T.S. Eliot gave the manuscript of The ...”

“... not want to go too close to him. He was dead within three years. More than twenty years later in Paris, the French critic Nicole Zande told me that she had met Suzanne Beckett, the wife of the author, if you can imagine such a wedding ceremony, one day on the street – as you did, I suppose, it being Paris – and asked ...”

“... The latter were rarely writers and the books they produced are undistinguished. Tom Barry’s Guerrilla Days in Ireland and Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom have their charms, but there was no Herzen or Trotsky capable of distilling the Irish revolutionary mentality and experience into a classic memoir: except for Ernie ...”

“... with a dog. One can go shopping with people, or cook, as I did with the late, great Jean Renoir in Paris, or deal with pigeons on a terrace as I did with Woody Allen. Earlier in the Seventies, as a working critic, Gilliatt spent rewarding afternoons watching films. She is at her best when, after a session of classics, perhaps at the Museum of Modern Art, she ...”

“... for me the ecstasy of the body and the torture of the mind.’ When he was 20, Agate went to Paris, to see the actress Réjane and provoke her into giving a better performance. He was devoted to the Great Actresses of his time, the women for whom the dramatists wrote their plays. He once wrote: ‘In my life I have seen six great actresses and six ...”

“... in the early 1960s was a feat of rediscovery as well as organisation. The Cinémathèque in Paris played an important role, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the key venue for the preservation of Hollywood’s greatest period of achievement. Hollywood itself never was, and Peter Bogdanovich’s originality as a curator lay in his awareness ...”

“... with ‘democratic’ values. ‘Often the word difficult comes up,’ the interviewer from the Paris Review said. ‘Like a Victorian wedding night, yes,’ Hill replied, a good example of his lugubrious wit, before mounting a defence: ‘Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other … I would add that ...”

“... Bolsheviks – that was ... incomprehensible.’ ‘In the Thirties,’ Arthur Miller told the Paris Review, ‘it was, to me, inconceivable that a socialist government could be really anti-semitic. It just could not happen.’ Donald Ogden Stewart stood out for Sayre among the Hampstead blacklistees in part because he came from her parents’ world. Like ...”

“... the dirty postcard lines – about eight or nine lines, good lines – and I asked the actor Barry McGovern if I should confess to Karel or not. All the Beckett fans were there, very deep, very solemn, and this boy from the audience looked up and said: ‘I was very interested, Mr Reisz, in why you cut the postcard scene.’ Karel just threw me one of ...”

“... retreat, and the population of London quadrupled between 1550 and 1700. It was rapidly overtaking Paris, and the West End, with its salubrious air and proximity to the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St James’s, was more attractive than ever. Its rise was unstoppable, its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge ...”

“... in Other Passports. They are all formal verse and one of them, ‘To Pete Atkin: Letter from Paris’, was his initial attempt at ottava rima, the stanza chosen later for his extended verse diaries. In a letter slightly earlier than the one to Atkin, he sets out what by then had become, and was to remain for many years, his creed. Interestingly, this ...”