“... London Evening Standard had turned down the editorship of the Times in favour of succeeding Sir David English at the Daily Mail. As a boy, wrote Sir Perry, he had wanted to be editor of the Times more than anything in the world. So when Mr Paul Dacre picked Rothermere’s Daily Mail in preference to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction ...”

“... them by hand, or mail them to interested parties for inspection. James adopted Fletchcrism in May 1904, as he was finishing The Golden Bowl his last major novel. Extolling ‘the divine Fletcher’, and taking an hour over a modest meal, he chewed slowly for almost six years, a period which coincides closely with his rereading and rewriting of his ...”

“... will be decisive. The key demographic – unaffiliated 40+ white voters in the swing states – may be pulled in two different directions. On the one hand, many of them clearly have an instinctive dislike of Barack Obama, because of his sanctimony, his cool demeanour, or because of the colour of his skin. On the other hand, many of them also appear to have ...”

“... What Death of a Salesman can’t be is a play about whether reality is real. Willy Loman may well be – as Bigsby argues – a man ‘finally unable to separate reality from appearance’, but we only know that because we can. Miller found a highly original way of dramatising the gap between the American dream and its achievement, and did it so ...”

“... it up, even in the North-West. And while Lennon had his self-indulgent and self-pitying side, and may well have said, ‘I like to write about me’ (as opposed to the outgoing McCartney), we are after all talking about the man who wrote ‘Revolution’, ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Imagine’. If his desire to steer an even course between contradictory ...”

“... in the common language, as when we attribute moral qualities to non-human things; so a tree may be ‘majestic’ or fields ‘joyful’. Partly because of this, associating the beautiful with the good can take place ‘without too violent a leap’. Because it is easy enough to think we can make the leap, there is a risk that we will confuse the proper ...”

“... him staring at ‘acting’ like a bull perplexed at being wounded by a matador.A key to Brando may be the way he carried us from an age of rapt belief in characters and their stories to fixing on acting itself. If you look at On the Waterfront now (65 years after it was made), some problems have surfaced: why does the Mob kill Charley instead of Terry? Are ...”

“... Press and Media Foundation, and that the 2022 election was ‘not free, let alone fair’. In May 2023, a delegation of members of the European Parliament concluded that Hungary’s audit system was inadequate and that the government was using public funds to ‘enrich the family and friends of Viktor Orbán’.The resignation of the conservative ...”

“... the country’ – that’s to say, with two fictionalisations, at quite different levels, of what may or may not have happened. Her enquiry was eventually modified to ‘How does the standard image of wartime London match with memory and experience?’ This means that she has to consider the loss of confidence, by ...”

“... Libération lay beneath a bridge during a firefight near Grozny while shells landed all about him. David Hearst of the Guardian and David Chater of Sky News, who had gone up to the village of Pervomaisk near Grozny to observe the Russian advance, were nearly killed by a shell and sniped at when they ran for cover. Witold ...”

“... him. And if he embarks on a memoir of himself, or they on a biography, the falsity of presentation may once again begin. If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in ...”

“... to persecute as others have persecuted Jews and Negroes. Lord Arran, House of Lords, 12 May 1965 Producing a documentary to mark the 30th anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality, I was struck by the very Victorian restrictions on the lives of gay men in the Sixties. Victim, the film in which Dirk Bogarde plays a married barrister ...”

“... of the fact that baseball is a tougher sport now than it was in the 1920s, suggests that Bonds may be performing at a higher level in the context of his generation than Ruth did in his. One of the advantages Ruth had was that he played at a time when baseball was a whites-only sport, and so never had to face any of the superb pitchers forced to ply their ...”

“... come high water. Superstorm Sandy arrived a week before the vote, a natural disaster that may have helped rescue Obama politically by reminding people on the East Coast that a federal government is sometimes a useful thing to have. The advent of postal voting means that the day itself is not quite as special as it once was, but it remains the focus of ...”

“... from Downing College.) Warner had a hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended him to David Garnett, another fantasist, whose Lady into Fox had been a great success in 1922. There seems to have been a market in those years for a peculiarly English brand of fantasy, but any imputation of parochialism must fail: Garnett was a man of wide ...”