“... failed. He ‘discovered’ the 21-year-old Phyllis Walker, née Isley, renamed her ‘Jennifer Jones’, and suggested her as the saintly heroine of The Song of Bernadette. Later, he recast her – as the sultry Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun, otherwise ‘Lust in the Dust’. Finally, he married her. Perhaps, behind all the business acumen and concern ...”

“... struggles, or was brought about by the cataclysm of 1914-1918. Another article, by Christopher Howard, details the Labour Party’s failure in the 1920s to expand local organisation and mass membership. It was the familiar story of small dedicated groups whose exertions ‘bore no little resemblance to the labours of Sisyphus’, and frustration fanned the ...”

“... response to one of the few occasions when a disability materialises as an aspect of the hero. Howard Breslin’s short story ‘Bad Day at Honda’ has an explicitly able-bodied protagonist, while Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) is famously one-armed. All Norden can think of to say is that Tracy’s character is ‘“remasculated” through ...”

“... it was more than 6ºF hotter. The urban heat island effect was first documented in 1818, when Luke Howard, an amateur meteorologist, took a series of temperature measurements in and around London which showed that the city was on average 4°F warmer than the surrounding countryside. It’s partly down to human activity (from driving to cooking to ...”

“... though occasionally, almost miraculously, it did. That I can remember the deaths both of Leslie Howard and of Carole Lombard chalked up on the newspaper-sellers’ boards in City Square hardly counts. But there was the afternoon sometime in the 1940s when I was out shopping with Mam and we were walking up Thornton’s Arcade and saw coming down a vast man ...”

“... national fund amounted to nearly £56,000, most of it raised in London. The money enabled Inigo Jones to rebuild the west front of the cathedral and to restore the choir – work which was not pulled down until 1687, having been weakened by the Great Fire. By contrast, the Puritan Feoffees of Impropriation, which Ashton hints were not necessarily distrusted ...”

“... most obviously Europhiles and those tainted with the original sin of 1990. Tristan Garel-Jones was known to Eurosceptics as ‘the Member for Madrid Central’ and the defeat of Chris Patten, the Conservative chairman, at Bath in 1992 was greeted at an election night gathering of Thatcher loyalists as a ‘Tory gain’. The voters came to recognise a ...”

“... interview with Simone Biles before she became a household name. The veteran reporter interviewed Howard Schultz at Starbucks headquarters. Ozy’s video stories were terrific but there were never enough of them to convince Watson that the video team wasn’t malingering. At its best, Ozy was clever, original. I managed a handful of stories I remember with ...”

“... conspiracy. The ideological adventurer, Jack Wheeler, known according to Bradlee as the ‘Indiana Jones of the Right’, had inspired the Reagan doctrine; North, placed in charge both of sustaining the Contras and of combating terrorism, embodied it. The Reagan doctrine declared a worldwide American right of counter-intervention against Communist ...”

“... but not a fine and really unusual Alma-Tadema portrait, an Egyptian terracotta statue, a Thomas Jones or a Lorenzo di Credi metalpoint; or that the largest picture on view would be a frothy, larky double portrait by Vanessa Bell of Mr and Mrs Maynard Keynes. The show is densely hung, with ten sections crammed into three rooms; but this rather serves as a ...”

“... who play ‘the mythical game of time’. An Occidental Haroun, he wears a broad-brimmed Indiana Jones hat. He’s a role player, a trans-dimensional tourist. Hence the language. ‘Pard’, according to Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, has no existence outside the fictionalised Wild West. Moorcock is like one of those local library researchers from ...”

“... commissioned England’s first classical building, the Queen’s House at Greenwich, from Inigo Jones, and masques from Ben Jonson – nicely summed up by Gareth Russell as ‘light on story and heavy on cost’. James was less enamoured of his new subjects. As he made his way down through England to take the throne, he became exasperated with all the ...”

“... that is the other impression one comes away with: the universal hatred and contempt for Michael Howard – prisoners, warders, teachers, everybody one speaks to complaining how he has stripped away from the service all those amenities which alleviate the lives of everyone cooped up here, warders and prisoners alike. Indeed one gets the feeling that the only ...”

“... of African descent had been enslaved in America. Sinclair worked as a financial secretary at Howard University, had degrees in theology and medicine and greatly admired Queen Victoria, the British Empire and Rudyard Kipling. He believed that the ‘blighting evils’ of his time, ‘mobs that torture human beings and roast them alive without trial; mobs ...”

“... debuts of some of Vonnegut’s contemporaries, notably Mailer with The Naked and the Dead, Jones with From Here to Eternity and Heller with Catch 22). After a conventionally modest beginning with the hardback-only Player Piano Vonnegut became a writer of original paperback fiction: a format which in those days categorically excluded a novelist from the ...”