“... the movie, a low gasp of recognition was involuntarily released into the crowded darkness of the hall. If the film was a western, or a war film, another form of preview, which I loved, was a sand table that would be set out in the foyer of the cinema, re-creating the high sierras and canyons of some unknown land, or the battlefields of Flanders with their ...”

“... McGreevy wrote, are frequently depicted in the pursuit of pleasure, at the circus or music-hall, at race meetings, or simply in conversation with each other. Yet often the expression on their faces suggests restraint, thoughtfulness, an inner discipline. Outwardly they so obviously belong to a more primitive state of society than has ever been depicted ...”

“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... is water retention). But now, providing I don’t look at myself in the mirror in the hall, I begin to see (as in feel) that it doesn’t matter so much. As I write there is a world refugee crisis. I’ve never had to cope with that. That little cancer in my lung, and the growing forest of fibrotic alveoli will kill me, but something would ...”

“... showmen,’ she replied. ‘In even their most carefree moments and their most abandoned moods,’ James Thurber noted, ‘there was scarcely ever the casual ring of authentic gaiety. They did not know how to invite gaiety. They twisted its arm, got it down, and sat on its chest.’An early short story, ‘Winter Dreams’, from the collection All the Sad ...”

“... horses. Dick Haymes was a brutal, abusive, manipulative drunk. Her brief marriage to the director James Hill was a last misconceived attempt to find calm and stability away from the film business. It was typical of her that she had chosen a man determined to reestablish her career. She was divorced from him by the judge who had married her to Orson Welles 18 ...”

“... stands in for Portnoy’s Complaint – and The Counterlife (1986). Theroux followed Roth into a hall of mirrors from which it is hard to find the exit. Roth’s rationale for this navel-gazing form of metafiction invoked the example of fine art, where self-portrait is a pre-eminent genre: what could be more natural than using as subject matter the material ...”

“... have many distinguished old boys though one which it never seems to acknowledge was the critic James Agate. This reticence may be on account of Agate’s well-known propensity to drink his own piss. 13 June. Three police acquitted in the case of Joy Gardner who died after being gagged with 13 inches of tape, a restraining belt and leg irons. It’s not ...”

“... comparison. Her later documentaries, Sud (1999, filmed in Jasper, Texas, following the lynching of James Byrd Jr and inspired by her reading of James Baldwin) and De l’autre côté (2002, filmed in Agua Prieta and Douglas, on either side of the US-Mexico border), use the same formal strategies as D’Est. If, in ...”

“... meals proceeded from kitchen to dining room by miniature railway, they owned a London house in St James’s Square, a Highland estate on the island of Jura, and a 16-bedroom seaside ‘cottage’ at Sandwich in Kent. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their five children somehow found the time to live in all four; worried about the safety of Jura milk, Nancy had her ...”

“... heart is an exhibit that pulses ‘ceiling-high, occup[ying] one corner of the large exhibition hall, and from wherever you stood in the hall you could hear its beating, thum-thump-thum-thump’.At Yaddo writers’ retreat, Frame at first avoided Philip Roth. Once they became friends, they took to writing each other ...”

“... their balladry. Housman was more interested in traditional ballads and, like Eliot, in music hall, than in art song. Parker mentions the publication of Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads between 1884 and 1898 as part of the new national conversation, though not William Allingham’s earlier anthology of British ballads, a copy of which ...”

“... their brand advisers were too worried that Confederate flags would be waving in the convention hall. His is the voice of the right-wing base, energised by funding from a small group of highly ideological oligarchs, no longer constrained by the globalist business elite. A cynic might say that Trump simply says out loud what many on the right have long ...”

“... first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky at the Queen’s Hall. When the Great War began, the Hôtel Beau-Site was commandeered by the French government and turned into a hospital. This, together with the wartime rent controls imposed on landlords, made the family finances suddenly precarious. The maids, to whom Tippett ...”

“... ironies – like Mr Silvero and Madame de Tornquist and Fraulein von Kulp ‘Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door’. Eliot’s developing verse, with its ambiguous enjambments and its swaying, divided syntax, its European echoes and its American intonations, returns to the image of a door about to be opened or shut, like The Waste Land’s ...”