“... for Girl Crazy (the last of her musicals with Rooney). ‘Embraceable You’ was choreographed by Charles Walters, a Broadway dancer and choreographer who would direct Easter Parade and Summer Stock. In the scene, Garland’s character has been given a white piano for her birthday: she sits on it and is wheeled round the room by a crowd of young men in dinner ...”

“... and then betrayed during the war, and is so reactionary a Catholic that an Irishman, Conor Cruise O’Brien, denounces him.Indeed, the whole of his oeuvre has been read as an attempt to bolster his self-confidence. His critics declare that he wanted to be sure that he really was in with the upper classes and not, like Paul Pennyfeather at the end of Decline ...”

“... the idea of a lost Catholic England gave him that on the scale of historical myth. As Conor Cruise O’Brien argued in a fine essay, Waugh was made for Jacobitism: the rightful king had always already taken to the hills.Yet if Protestantism was disastrous it was also oddly superficial since, as Waugh thought, ‘the Catholic structure still lies lightly buried ...”

“... indeed receive the royal nod. Instead, Roth chose Blake Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the ...”

“... to Nancy Drew or Tom Sawyer as an ‘innocent abroad’. Badlands was loosely based on the case of Charles Starkweather, who went on a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming in the late 1950s together with his teenage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. In the movie Holly meets Kit (Martin Sheen) in a South Dakota town: ‘Little did I realise,’ she tells us over ...”

“... use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of evil in childhood, The Night of the Hunter. He died in 1955, of a heart attack, aged 45, leaving behind several manuscript chapters of an autobiographical novel, A ...”

“... of American neo-conservatism – Alan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Joseph Epstein, Hilton Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise ...”

“... settled: the woman of independent means who has done quite well for herself, as Carter described Charles Perrault’s version of the figure, who waves wands and make things happen, transcending biological relatedness and bourgeois property law. Carter, Sage proposes, ‘birthed herself’ into that position through years and decades of intellectual and ...”

“... kept aside some money for this counter-Encounter, not a great deal, but it was just lying there. Charles Osborne, who was literature director of the Council at that point, saw no reason why, if I reinvented the Review as a new monthly magazine, that money – I think about £20,000 – couldn’t go to launch one issue of it. And that’s how the New Review ...”