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“... says: ‘How do you do?’ He replies: ‘Well, that’s a big question.’ Asked if he knew William Randolph Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, he says yes – ‘if anyone did’. When Houseman worries about being fired, Mank says, ‘I’ve never not been fired,’ as if confirming an earlier remark that ‘every ...”

“... containing his correspondence with one or more persons – for example, Edward Garnett, William Blackwood and Cunninghame Graham. Early letters to Polish friends and relations have been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French. However, it seems that ‘more than a third of Conrad’s ...”

“... the number of people she went to bed with but the ease with which she fell in love. With Austin Davies – an artist in a duffel coat, whom she married. With Don McKinlay, a painter whom she fell for over a bottle of vodka when he was brown in white trousers. With Alan Sharp, a novelist and playwright: Alan arrives at 6.30. A hearty discussion on ...”

“... of the Other Woman’). When the New Yorker writer Lillian Ross embarked on a relationship with William Shawn, the magazine’s married editor, she couldn’t even bear to call it ‘having an affair’, never mind ‘mistressdom’. In Ross’s view, a mistress was ‘a heavily mascaraed woman in a corny movie, wearing a negligee and sitting around sulking ...”

“... event. Generations of schoolchildren and students thumbed their way through their predecessors, Davies and Clark, Woodward and Ensor, and it must be an agreeable thought to the new authors that their books will be selling deep into the 21st century. Paul Langford’s volume invites comparison with Basil Williams’s The Whig Supremacy, which appeared ...”

“... awful potency lasted pretty much through the 1980s, powering the gorgeous prescience and horror of William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, only to peter out, pretty much, by the mid-1990s, as the dull commercial reality – the real ‘consensual hallucination’, to repurpose Gibson’s phrase – of internet shopping kicked in. There was also, after 1977, the ...”

“... But the alleged provenance was intriguing. Sullivan invented a psychical researcher called William Doidge, who had, he said, fought with the Scots Guards at the Battle of Mons in August 1914. The angel had been caught on camera much later, in the Cotswolds in 1952. It’s a well-known story that British soldiers at Mons claimed they really did see ...”

“... when I was about five. There were a few blissful memories of being scared out of my wits by William Hartnell in Dr Who, then nothing but The Archers, Round the Horne and Just a Minute for the next decade. By contrast, my wife grew up in a household where radio was virtually unknown while the television was switched on in the morning and remained that ...”

“... He was presumably referring to her heroin addiction. Friends and mentors over the years – Rhys Davies. Peter Owen, Brian Aldiss – have made considerable efforts to dispel such feelings of uncase by stressing how smart and cheerful she, was how little her drug addiction appeared to affect her. Such loyal friends did not wish her to be regarded as a ...”

“... nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my reach’, and he began seeking out the company of these people, who were members of a ...”

“... the role that economic considerations had played. When the memorandum was sent round the FO, William Rodgers minuted that ‘my only doubt about a good paper is whether paragraphs 12 and 13 are best included, given the likely circulation now or in the minutes to some critics within the government whose murmurs are sometimes heard outside.’ Paragraphs ...”

“... follow the lives and the 4000-mile migrations of seals southwards from Greenland, and Brian Davies, founder twenty years ago of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, tells of his success in 1983 in persuading the EEC Governments to ban the import of baby seal products. By 1987 he had procured a similar ban in Canada. ...”

“... finished a screenplay, quite a good one, about the body-snatchers Burke and Hare. His friend William Empson remembered him speaking in detail about a film he wanted to make about the life of Dickens, ‘very profound and very box office’, as Empson remembered it, adding loyally: ‘If Dylan had lived a normal span of life it would have been likely to ...”

“... on particular sections of the population. A preliminary study of the Soviet élite, by Getty and William Chase, indicates that, contrary to the usual assumption, the purges hit economic administrators more severely than writers and other members of the creative intelligentsia. An ingenious study by Sheila Fitzpatrick of Moscow and Leningrad telephone ...”

“... nameless things were carefully preserved in the cellar.’ He could read Maigret and watch Rupert Davies in the title role on TV, tamping his pipe and scenting sexual misbehaviour. But the gossipy stimulus ebbed away. ‘I am between paintings so am in a dreadful way. I hate being between so will start anything no wonder they get odd sometimes.’ Oh for the ...”