“... if I was talking about someone else’s parents, not ours. Not his.’In those days, when we were young, most things weren’t strange. It wasn’t strange that our mother told her three children we couldn’t call her anything but ‘Mother’ (‘Mummy’ was the sole exception) and our dad anything but ‘Father’, even when this made us sound like ...”

“... and patiently explain to him that, at the Casino Theater at 39th and Broadway, there were three young Jewish fellows running around the stage shouting to an indifferent world that they were all Napoleon?’ But the world in the postwar years was not indifferent to the brothers, even if Groucho was the only one prudent enough to consolidate his gains. A ...”

“... of Kubrick raising his voice – but the occasion is the more remarkable for that. He was a young director, still in his twenties, Douglas a top-billed actor in his prime, but Kubrick asserted his authority for everyone to hear. His identification with his films was arbitrary, complete and brooked no exception.The final scene of Paths of Glory gave ...”

“... A working-class Catholic born in Liverpool in 1954, who became a driven and brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son from a one-room flat in the East End, born in 1944, who trained as an accountant and then made a ...”

“... on national security affairs that I know’. What was going on? When Kissinger told his friend Arthur Schlesinger that he found Quayle to be ‘well-informed and intelligent’, Schlesinger took it to mean ‘that Quayle listens reverently to Henry and that Henry thinks Quayle may be president someday’. When that dream died, he moved on to George ...”

“... closed off by her security men. I see a couple of proprietorial Russians trying to ferry Arthur Miller to the graveside. Squeezing past, he steps apologetically on our toes in one direction and then again in the other direction – but gets no nearer the epicentre represented by Yevtushenko and the television cameras. Yevtushenko introduces each ...”

“... at Sobibor on 9 July 1943. Gunther fell between the stools of eligibility for reparations: too young for a profession, he couldn’t get reparations for his career being interrupted; being between high school and university when the war began, he couldn’t argue that his studies had been interrupted.My grandmother never quite believed that her daughter ...”

“... ambitious and glamorous musical numbers. These were produced by the so-called Freed Unit, led by Arthur Freed and staffed by brilliant choreographers, composers, dancers and musicians, many of them gay men (studio insiders referred to the unit as ‘Freed’s Fairies’). The most important person in the unit as far as Garland was concerned was Edens, who ...”

“... attempts to ‘unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work’ began at a young age, though there is remarkably little to be learned about his earliest thoughts in Free Creations of the Human Mind, which glosses over his childhood with indecent haste, moving from his birth in Ulm on 14 March 1879 to his move to Bern at the age of 22 in ...”

“... might help prop him up in his doddering years.‘Philip had searched diligently for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I ...”

“... campaign to vilify Casement, there was a public commission demanding a reprieve, spearheaded by Arthur Conan Doyle. The signatories included Arnold Bennett, G.K. Chesterton, J.G. Frazer, John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome, John Masefield and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. George Bernard Shaw also petitioned for a pardon – in fact, it would be hard to imagine ...”

“... to all culture’ – just what Wilson now set about doing.He wrote Jitney in ten days, sitting at Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, and sent it to the National Playwrights Conference. The conference, held every year in Waterford, Connecticut, had been established to help young dramatists work on flawed but promising ...”

“... pink and exhausted and a bit frightened of the ladies.The tour, led by a somewhat zombie-like young Native American woman, turns out to be perfunctory. She recites a canned history of the place in somnambulist fashion; shows us the Indian cemetery and explains that everyone in it is buried upright. We see adobe huts under repair and hear about the bricks ...”

“... a big middle-aged man in a raincoat, who said he was a detective sergeant, and a sensitive-looking young constable in uniform, who didn’t say anything at all. ‘You’ve taken your time,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘Yes,’ said the sergeant. ‘We would have been earlier but there was a slight ... ah, glitch as they say. Rang the wrong doorbell. The fault of ...”

“... his friend the painter John Opie about the law on bigamy and perjury. Opie wished to marry the young Norwich radical writer Amelia Alderson, but he was already married to a woman who had since run off with an Irish army officer, as so many young wives did in those days. Opie wanted to prove that his marriage had not been ...”