“... can only be grateful that the three publishers fighting over The Media Reader have left Prentice-Hall searching a thesaurus for The Media Casebook, while Sage spins around the colon to distinguish Culture and Power: A Media, Culture & Society Reader from Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader. For the benefit of anyone who hadn’t picked up on the ...”

“... woman, of motherhood and a creative life (as in Cyril Connolly’s famous jibe at the pram in the hall). But many women artists have had children, some of them even a whole gaggle of them. Julie Phillips’s book The Baby on the Fire Escape gives a broader historical picture of the many stratagems women artists have devised. Less attention has been given to ...”

“... Heaney knocking at the bedroom door. He was great in a brown tweed suit, his face lighting the hall with expected mirth. ‘That’s some driving you’ve done,’ he said. ‘There’s a dram in it for you and we’ll be downstairs.’Karl always imagines, in the Edinburgh style, that a beer means a half pint, but Seamus is a proper drinker and you see ...”

“... his most unspeakable thoughts – ‘unspeakable’ in the sense adopted by his fictional Maurice Hall (‘I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’) – but also his worries and rages (‘Last night, alone, I had a satanic fit of rage against mother for her grumbling and fault-finding, and figured a scene in which I swept the mantelpiece with my arm ...”

“... Loy arrived in Mexico City, and there they were married on 25 January 1918. ‘We left the town hall, walking with great strides like conquering giants,’ she wrote. They set up home, very poor, in a ‘terrible’ room with arum lilies on the patio and ‘old sorceresses’ squatting on the pavement outside. Brown describes Loy cooking tortillas on a ...”

“... of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting hall for hire, weddings a speciality), that is being prepared for its tent-show apocalypse, has never previously been part of the Greenwich story. The peninsula, if you check it out on a 19th-century map, is a vestigial tail, a pre-amputation stump known as ...”

“... up a wholesome restaurant where they face opposition from the local saloon-owner and the ‘dance-hall girls’ led by a scheming Angela Lansbury. It is as unserious and fun as The Clock is earnest. The musical is enjoyable if forgettable, but Garland’s performance is dazzling.The movie’s most famous sequence – ‘On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa ...”

“... still shocking.In 1922 thousands had gathered to watch the new MPs take the night mail to London. James Maxton, the most charismatic of the group, assured the crowd that ‘they would see the atmosphere of the Clyde getting the better of the House of Commons.’ Maxton and his colleagues were members of the Independent Labour Party (until 1918 you couldn’t ...”

“... catalogues were seen as responsible and accurate. Collections purchased from the heirs of John James, Chris Torrance, Andrew Crozier, Tom Raworth, for example, were meticulously anatomised and assigned a monetary value. When there is only one copy left in the world, the single sheet nobody carried home is priceless. It only takes one committed collector to ...”

“... and a business are sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called Stella, and the fourth sibling, James, has a son called Edward, though his biological father might actually have been Thomas. The family firm, General Roll, deals in player pianos and the punched paper rolls they require. There are assets involved, liabilities and potentially power struggles of ...”

“... was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he ...”

“... is Taylor’s own mixed feelings about film acting. Some movie stars – Ingrid Bergman, say, or James Stewart – are excellent in almost everything they do. Others have glory years interspersed with disappointments. And then there is Taylor. Although technically superb as a film actor, having been schooled since her childhood on the MGM lot, her ...”

“... George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to replace all other taxes, as do some American conservatives. All the ...”

“... you whole again, a claim that Stephen must have seemed to epitomise as he strode back into Trinity Hall with a fresh Alp in his pocket; and Meredith would have warmly agreed. The climactic episode in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is a walk through the woods, a breezy aesthetic experience which marks the hero’s moral regeneration. (You are reminded of Irving ...”

“... was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of purple, went to a midnight screening of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises at the Century movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, and sprayed the crowd with bullets, killing 12 and injuring 70. He had earlier thought ...”