“... charge of the whole production, you wonder, and who on earth are they when they are at home? The silver screen offers a frightening gallery of rogue vents – from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as ...”

“... of Spain who controlled the finest army in the Old World and the seemingly inexhaustible gold and silver of the New’. It was the Dutch revolt which gave hope that the triumph of Spain could be averted and Spanish domination of Western Europe prevented. In August 1585, Elizabeth took the Dutch under her protection and promised to send forces to aid them. She ...”

“... Palm Tree took me back to 1969 and the moment when real money, the paper kind that came with a few silver coins in a small brown envelope, disappeared. For ever. I had a casual labouring job, unloading containers and stacking trucks and vans in muddy sheds alongside the railway in Stratford. Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, Stratford East: a wonderful bucolic ...”

“... the pupils are half-hidden under the eyelids; as if the eyes had stopped between floors. Spike Lee has similar eyes, which I find attractive, maybe because they give a sense of inhabiting worlds other than this; they are, of course, irritating for exactly the same reason.A call from Barry Cryer, who claims to have heard a woman outside Liberty’s saying ...”

“... 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 was still a ...”

“... the day: The evening was dim, light grey with wet humid mist, swimming green. I took a pair of silver-plated scissors in my raincoat pocket with the intent to cut another rose – yellow, if possible – from the rose garden (by the stone lion’s head fountain) just come into bloom – a rose to begin to unbud as the red, almost black-red rose now giving ...”

“... many, many billions of dollars,’ he lied during one of the presidential debates. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he insists that he has pulled himself up by his bootstraps. But, as well as staking him to launch his real-estate career, when the Taj was sinking like Donald’s own private Titanic, Fred Trump rushed to the casino to buy $3.35 million ...”

“... are usually red, black or purple, and ‘for some special ceremonies important members wear gold, silver, or other colours.’ Their rites are carried out in barns, churchyards, churches, crypts, cemeteries, derelict houses. They worship within a circle which may be drawn or marked on the ground or made with string or twine. Their rites include prayers and ...”

“... Notice the daub that represents Princess Di in tiara outside the alms-houses that shelter in the lee of the Greenwich power-station. Look back at each turn of the river on the charming nautical town, the sun setting across the mud. But forget any notion of keeping to the path. The Dome site finishes all that. A security gate blocks the route towards the ...”

“... of labour and delivery. Hence the sandwiches which he relished at noon looking out to sea from the lee of a great rock on the first summit scaled. You may imagine his thoughts before and after as he strode through the gorse and heather. Beckett seems to have had an uncomplicated relationship with his father. In April 1933 he wrote to McGreevy: ‘Lovely walk ...”

“... BBC7’s This Sceptred Isle, a history of England read by Anna Massey, Peter Jeffrey, Christopher Lee and Paul Eddington. Afterwards I take the tray back downstairs to get my midday pills: two Omega 3 tablets, one selenium and one Saw palmetto plus a piece of dark chocolate and a cup of green tea. It probably sounds nicer than I actually find it, which is ...”

“... young client had none of the star power of already signed performers like Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee; his billing read ‘Extra Added Attraction’, and for Sinatra this particular gig was a pretty big deal. As Donald Clarke puts it in All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (1997), the Paramount Theatre was ‘one of the shrines of the Swing ...”

“... but so did Napoleon’s. Why, then, does it seem so laughable to rank MacArthur with Grant and Lee, let alone with Marlborough and Cromwell? Why has no one pinned down the MacArthur mystery? One reason is that MacArthur’s most notable innovations were in propaganda and politics, fields in which few soldiers (or military writers) feel at home. But the ...”

“... and vanished from the story, leaving him to his drills and shovels. Lyttle posed in the rubble, silver hair combed, neat in open-necked shirt and faded trenchcoat. ‘Artists don’t need to take on a moral tone,’ Russo said. ‘I kind of like the idea of the artist as devil’s advocate.’ But she wasn’t prepared to inflict the Mole Man on the editor ...”

“... not say. The senior partner, whom we had first consulted, was a distinguished looking figure, silver-haired, loud-talking, a Rotarian and pillar of the community. Unsurprisingly he was also a pull your socks up merchant and did not hold with depression. At his happiest going down potholes to assist stricken cavers, he was less adept at getting patients ...”