“... making it hard even for her to feel settled within any single identity.’ In his book on Woody Allen (1990) he expands: ‘Many observers have been content to settle on the fairly contemptuous belief that movie stars “play themselves” – as if playing oneself were easy, given the complex, contradictory material at hand and the problem of ...”

“... at the Evening Standard awards lunch. I was struck by how stylish and Ivy League he was (like Woody Allen, who wore similarly dapper outfits then), slim and neat in a look I always fancied. More striking was that Albee was there in company with his male partner, which was still a bold step in 1972 and only the second time I had come across such an ...”

“... much part of life. If you need complete secularism, it’s not Wittgenstein you should go to but Woody Allen: ‘I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it ...”

“... Peter Cowie tells us, Brando reads the whole poem. This is a great, time-twisting gag, worthy of Woody Allen. A resurrected fictional character, cued by a reference to himself in his earlier incarnation, picks up and reads a work by a real-life poet. Coppola now seems to have invented Conrad, Kurtz and Eliot, but the only real agent here is ...”

“... can’t have written this novel, or any novel we could read, because he’s only fictional, as Woody Allen would say, and fictional authors have even more trouble finding real publishers than flesh-and-bones authors do. But then imagining the Master has written the novel fictionalises us, pulls us into his world rather than puts him in ours. In this ...”

“... rediscovered not only by the Dadaist fringe of the 1960s antiwar movement but by Dick Cavett, Woody Allen and other literate and nostalgic entertainers. He appeared now as the honoured guest in public celebrations and televised specials which showed his energy waning but his mischief fundamentally unchanged. He presided over the rehearsals of ...”

“... He was dismayed by the enthusiasm of rebels like the bearded János Kis, who reminded him of a Woody Allen character: ‘They’re just not ready.’ His team shared his fear that the Cold War might end in chaos and local conflicts. At the start of the year, Bush had sent Henry Kissinger (codenamed ‘Kitty’) to Moscow on a secret mission to make ...”

“... on screen, only to be thrown out of the story and back into the stalls by the screen villain. (Woody Allen appropriated the conceit in both The Purple Rose of Cairo and his short story ‘The Kugelmass Episode’, where the narrator, a professor of literature, finds himself trapped with Madame Bovary and visible to the novel’s readers.) Keaton’s ...”

“... Buckley increasingly lived off the fumes of his celebrity. He was at ease trading barbs with Woody Allen, and his high camp theatrics were compared to Andy Warhol’s by Hugh Kenner, a National Review colleague. By the turn of the millennium, National Review had been supplanted by William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, a neoconservative cheerleader ...”

“... gaiety.Buñuel likes some contemporary directors, but not many. American films, he says. Woody Allen. Stanley Kubrick. ‘That film with those shots of the man’s eye.’ ‘A Clockwork Orange?’ ‘That’s the one.’ Nice thought, coming from the man whose film career began with the image of an eye slashed by a razor. Buñuel tells me a ...”

“... Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our nomination. My trajectory seemed as straight and clear as ...”

“... was ending. When they first got together, mutual friends had been quick to sound the alarm. Allen Tate warned Hardwick that ‘Cal is dangerous. There are definite homicidal implications in his world, particularly toward women and children … You must not let him in your apartment.’ He had twice broken the nose of his first wife, Jean Stafford, and ...”

“... had these parties. He was wondering whether I’d be interested to go to New York. He could invite Woody Allen.’ Penrose’s colleagues told him that Epstein was a convicted sex offender; Penrose recommended to Epstein that he support a colleague of his, a female physicist, but decided to skip the party.We​ are in two minds when it comes to how genius ...”

“... the set and Godard tore up the script, beginning again with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. Woody Allen did a walk-on as Mr Alien and Godard himself appeared as Professor Pluggy. Mailer’s vision of the film as a gangster movie in the tradition of The Godfather was systematically thrown to the winds. 7. Stabilisation. In the most recent phase of ...”

“... that ‘a novelist must arrange the facts to entertain his readers.’ (In one of his parodies, Woody Allen has Maugham advising: ‘At the end of an interrogatory sentence, place a question mark. You’d be surprised how effective it can be.’) Waugh described him as a master of ‘creating the appetite for information . . . withholding it until ...”