“... continuity to a minimum in order to make new readers feel welcome.) In the army he was the star investigator and later commanding officer of a military police unit that handled thorny cases involving wayward special forces personnel. From the age of six, he showed an unusually ‘aggressive response to danger’ and he’s the only non-marine in ...”

“... would be here somewhere, sitting in the corner of the room with that exact blue uniform and film-star skin. Of course there could be nothing there. It was just another of my outmoded fantasies, my own hackneyed way of trying to cope. I may have slept then. Certainly I conjured images as contradictory as a dream. I am reaching out, one hand splayed, through ...”

“... Tom saw Betty more often than he will.But power there grows out of the symbol of an asterisk, the star-chamber symbol for ‘unacceptable’.Not but what there is a regular attempt to palliate the charge. It is a pity even to seem to be agreeing with Roy Harris, who not only does not believe that ... but doesn’t believe in most things (dictionaries, for ...”

“... of the education director’s pious assassin, who tells his victim that ‘the celebrated film star Elizabeth Taylor . . . might have known some happiness’ if she’d taken the veil. (‘Why are you laughing, sir?’) Kars is haunted by its Armenian history, and Pamuk has Ipek discuss a local museum commemorating ‘the Armenian Massacre. Naturally, she ...”

“... attempt to keep their street cred, propose that Charlie act as a character witness for the sports star, and offer in return to ask the bankers for lenience. With his other hand, Croker orders layoffs at a food-processing plant in his empire, and thus indirectly ruins the life of Conrad Hensley. This young loser, pitched into hell, redeems himself by his ...”

“... themselves as elements of the icon that stands in for Clift, a potent image of the suffering star. Having seen himself in Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), Clift, so the story goes, knew that fame was coming to him, and grabbed the opportunity to get drunk anonymously one last time. In the years of his renown, it could seem as though his aim was to hold ...”

“... to try to stitch together a narrative that will make sense of what happened to him. Everything Christopher did when he was alive had shades of secrecy: the non-fiction book he was working on about grief, his seemingly meaningless and extravagant final trip to Greece, his reading habits. Among his effects, his widow comes across a back issue of the LRB ...”

“... at the time by all the misleading critics, can hardly be imagined. In a later letter about the star producer of the age, moreover, Auden continues to be absolutely on the musical dot: ‘Ebert has asked too much money for the direction etc, etc. As to the latter, it sounds rather conceited to say so, I know, but I believe that I and Kallman could do an ...”

“... for Mrs Margaret Thatcher, not least because its opening contribution comes from her favourite TV star and economist, Milton Friedman, the man for whom the British economy is now what St Paul’s was to Sir Christopher Wren: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Professor Friedman’s contribution, an extract from his ...”

“... in a cheap hotel, then sublet the art historian Lucy Lippard’s loft, a 15-minute walk from Christopher Street, the new hub of gay life after Stonewall. One night at the International Stud he ran into the young August Kleinzahler – out on a bar crawl with his gay older brother – who later described him as ‘a tall, handsome-looking galoot in a ...”

“... in order to remove rivals to its hegemony. The American empire, for him, is like the Empire in Star Wars: any member of a local population who thinks its influence a good thing for his country is a fool, a coward or a traitor. But there is a very different way of looking at the role Kouchner has played in the spread of US hegemony. Very few of the people ...”

“... hotel on 2 January 2000. King’s Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed, with the estranged son as star witness, was published two months later.A Very Private Life is the second and final part of a 1100-page counterblast to King’s book by Nikolai Tolstoy, the second Mrs O’Brian’s son from her marriage to Count Dimitri Tolstoy, the man she left for ...”

“... that Nureyev would return to grace the stage of Ufa, its capital. Very quickly he became a star. Flower-throwing was strictly forbidden, but at the end of his variations the stage of the Kirov was often covered in smuggled-in peonies. With his partner Alla Sizova he wowed the judges at the Seventh Communist World Youth festival in Vienna in ...”

“... for years to come, while his plays began to establish social conscience at the level of style. Christopher Bigbsy, the author of this new biography, has a perfect ear for the manners and motions of Miller’s art, and he tells a gripping story of Miller’s hunt for truth. There are mysteries to bear and ironies to become invested in – all good ...”

“... in the period on which a leading historian worked to write their biography (perhaps you don’t)?Christopher Hill had a fortunate life on the whole, and his good fortune now extends beyond the grave in the shape of this excellent biography. Michael Braddick is himself a distinguished historian of 17th-century England, the period that was the focus of ...”