“... time came they could leave together. The undecided slept in a large open room. An Israeli relief charity ran a disco where volunteers danced with Ukrainian kids under strobe lights. A clown in a top hat and red nose roamed around doing magic tricks. A canvas sheet was spread along the length of a wall, and children crouched over it painting a mural. Someone ...”

“... a decade on from Gamlin’s prime, such avuncular kidding could gain you your own TV show plus charity-god status, an almost nationalised belief in your goodness and zaniness and readiness to help. But Gamlin lived his double life in the country that existed before Cliff Richard. On the back of his broadcasting fame, and his other interests, he became a ...”

“... their yellow-eyed mamas and idiot boys. But there is a patience in Capote’s novel, a surprising charity, a seamlessly variegated emotion, that would have made it quite remarkable in a very good writer double his age, which was 24. People tend to blame early success for all the horrors that follow. But that can only be partly true for Truman Capote. Success ...”

“... a-Bang’.) To make money, Elton began to work as a session musician, singing backing vocals for Tom Jones and playing piano with the Hollies. He also worked for a label called Marble Arch which knocked out versions of chart hits and sold the albums cheap in supermarkets. This, Elton points out, might sound sad, but it was in fact ‘screamingly, howlingly ...”

“... considered an overseas ‘media import like Hill Street Blues’, in Garfield’s words. The gay charity Switchboard assured nervous callers that ‘sex is as safe as crossing the road.’ When Terrence Higgins collapsed at work and began inexplicably dying in a London hospital in July 1982, his boyfriend suggested to doctors that ‘maybe it was this ...”

“... He’s a nice fellow the nephew of Cissie Sinclair [who had been a painter] … It would be a charity to ask him round one afternoon and show him a few pictures and drop all the conversational bombs you have handy without pretending anything. But the luck will be all on his side, he says very little, especially at first, and you might find him not ...”

“... place to shop and though there are one or two empty premises it hasn’t yet been given over to charity shops, which is the first symptom of a town dying. The spirit of the small shop still persists in Booth’s, the local supermarket. At the cheese counter I ask for some Parmesan, which might be thought a relative newcomer to this out of the way Craven ...”

“... potential of any encounter between two worlds that are normally insulated from each other. (Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is built around a similar episode.) In Third World countries, such meetings can have a special poignancy. When my car stopped at an intersection in Mexico City, young boys came up to us to show their flame-eating ...”

“... ruthless[ly] exploit you when they can, and especially exploit your feelings of sympathy and charity, and kick you all the harder in the teeth if you cease to be of use to them, or draw back a little on being exploited.’ There’s probably a lesson in that; her younger self would have made a column out of it. Deborah Friedell discusses Dorothy ...”

“... capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly a more egalitarian country than England’, its ‘gritty sense of equality derives from the old theocracy, not from Jacobinism or Bolshevism … the ...”

“... Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, it was considered a marvel, and why Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, charming though it was, failed because it was self-indulgent. Self-indulgence was very often the reason for a film or play to fail in the eyes of Doris and her friends. It seemed to be a trap waiting for every maker of every art, and I couldn’t ...”

“... United States had never heard of al-Qaida, the mission to Somalia was seen as a thankless act of charity, and Sudan was too inconsequential to worry about.’ Wright devotes much of the latter part of The Looming Tower to the story of John O’Neill, the senior FBI agent who saw the danger of bin Laden early, wanted to arrest him and put him on trial when ...”

“... scatter of yellow drops on the kerb all that remains to mark its final parking place. January 1971 Charity in Gloucester Crescent takes refined forms. The publishers next door are bringing out some Classical volume and to celebrate the event last night held a Roman Dinner. This morning the au pair was to be seen knocking at the window of the van with a plate ...”

“... He believes he can win her back through displays of wealth and manners, but she is now married to Tom Buchanan, an upper-class boor. Trump’s claim to have risen Gatsby-like is the opposite of Gatsby’s magical self-invention. Gatsby was careful to maintain the air of the gentleman he wished to be taken for. Trump is the uncouth son of privilege for ...”

“... in the dead centre of some new version of the rake’s progress. In Tony Richardson’s movie Tom Jones, which came out in 1963, there were waifs galore, dependent on and resenting the goodwill of strangers. But what could I be resentful about? Being resentful was the wickedest thing I could imagine, though it sometimes felt like a get-out clause for my ...”