“... While Hopper was still in his twenties, and noisily convinced that he was a better actor than Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward concluded (some time after hitting him on the head at a party with an antique copper bedwarmer): ‘Dennis is a genius. I’m not sure of what, and I’m not sure Dennis knows of what. Certainly not acting. But he is a genius.’ It ...”

“... time, long ago, when one thing the very rich and very famous could be relied on to do was shut up. Paul Getty, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Grace of Monaco wrapped their money around themselves in the form of impenetrable walls and/or designer sunglasses and kept silent while the world wondered and chattered. And you would imagine that if money could ...”

“... as the first novel of the Resistance. In the public realm, her name was firmly linked to Jean-Paul Sartre’s, and to existentialism, which was becoming so fashionable that Sartre had to hire a secretary. No longer a beginner, no longer unknown, Beauvoir had nothing to prove; she could write about anything. She decided to write about herself. She was ...”

“... January were at any risk of fading, they were rekindled on 28 October, when David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer after breaking into their home in San Francisco (she subsequently announced she was standing down as Speaker). DePape shook Pelosi awake with cries of ‘Where’s Nancy?’ – the ...”

“... us, we have never acquired the adult mind.’ 18 February. Ned Sherrin’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. A friendly service interspersed with songs, some from Sondheim, some from Sherrin and Brahms, but with none of them as tuneful as the hymns. The audience is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson ...”

“... considered them bothersome rather than dangerous. Matt, their ninth child, announced that he was Paul McCartney and that his moods controlled the weather. Peter, their tenth child, said that he was a secret agent who worked for Queen Elizabeth. Brian, their fourth child, seemed well enough until, aged 22, he shot and killed his girlfriend, then himself. None ...”

“... these genres had defeated everyone except very rare, much more experienced talents such as Miles Davis and Captain Beefheart, but the Pop Group were undeterred: not only did they plan to create a new music, they planned to use it to carry the most challenging political lyrics. The music press, which was going through a highbrow phase almost unimaginable ...”

“... and maharajas (‘the most colossal and expensive meal in world history’, according to Mike Davis) while 100,000 people died of starvation in Mysore and Madras. Lytton blamed the Great Famine of 1876-78, which caused an estimated 8.2 million deaths, on the tendency of the Indian population ‘to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the ...”

“... reign was the Georg Solti era (1961-71). Tooley presided over the rather lesser era of Colin Davis (1971-86). Things, indeed, began to fall apart when Davis’s partnerships with Peter Hall and Götz Friedrich broke down. Tooley dutifully chronicles the years from 1947 to 1988, but only comes alive in his final 80 ...”

“... or ‘Hey, pop!/Re-bop!/Mop!// Y-e-a-h!’ It’s crowded with names (Dizzy Gillespie, Sammy Davis, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson), with flashing neon (WONDER BAR, CASBAH, SHALIMAR), with headlines, snatches of speech, children’s rhymes, lists of goods for sale (‘Groceries/Suits/Fruits/Watches/Diamond rings/THE ...”

“... supplier and published an article in a medical journal about its stimulating effects. Parke, Davis, the US’s leading supplier of cocaine (which it marketed as ‘the most important therapeutic discovery of the age’), was looking for alternative ‘vegetable drugs’ because cocaine’s habit-forming potential was beginning to gain attention. They ...”

“... project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of evil in childhood, The Night of the Hunter. He died in 1955, of a heart attack, aged 45, leaving behind several manuscript chapters of an autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family. That, paired with ...”

“... Carrie and Robert went to the movies, Annye tagged along: ‘They liked to see Mae West and Bette Davis, and I was a nuisance, always running to the bathroom and wanting popcorn.’ She remembers Robert singing cowboy songs, like Gene Autry’s ‘That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine’, and cracking jokes ‘about Ol’ Massa’. ‘He wasn’t ...”

“... as an ironic shorthand for the futility and mendacity of US policy. Eventually the filmmaker Peter Davis used the phrase as the title for his 1974 documentary which exposed the American invaders’ casual brutality and indifference towards Asian lives. Clinton was involved, however tangentially, in the antiwar counterculture. Yet, like everyone else in ...”

“... rights won in the war’s aftermath had been rescinded. White America’s attitude, the Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote, seemed to be: ‘Negroes, you may fight for us, but you may not vote for us.’Service in the First World War also brought little lasting improvement in the Black condition. In the Crisis, the monthly publication of the ...”