“... acting on the stage’ in the description of the political contacts-man and Astor consigliere Tom Jones, using words of the sort that later stuck like labels to Waldorf’s son David wherever he went. Waldorf’s wife, whom he met on an Atlantic crossing, was the opposite. Variously compared to a gnat, a grasshopper and a Chinese cracker, Nancy Langhorne was ...”

“... the meaning of Shakespeare in modern America, with talking heads ranging from Vanessa Redgrave to Stanley Wells and Barbara Everett. It’s an odd mixture, but somehow it works, both as a legible rendition of the play and as a portrait of the craft of translating Shakespeare for modern audiences.Looking for Richard took Pacino years to finish because he had ...”

“... Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and following useful love affairs with Alain Delon, Bob Dylan and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, was determined to get into music one way or another. The Velvet Underground managed to sneak away from Warhol without utterly alienating him, and became a real rock band, albeit an unusual one, with ever-changing personnel. They ...”

“... when he accepted a commission from the New York Review of Books to review Blues People by LeRoi Jones, who was soon to change his name to Amiri Baraka.Blues People, like much that is written by Negro Americans at the present moment, takes on an inevitable resonance from the Freedom Movement, but it is in itself characterised by a straining for a note of ...”

“... her usual favourite, jostled for prominence with Käthe Schönfeld, Matilda Berry, Elizabeth Stanley, Julian Mark, Mrs K. Bendall, Kass, Katharina, Katoushka and Kissienka. The stories she told about herself often didn’t add up – biographers pick and choose which to believe, and hope for the best. Her handwriting was close to illegible, so quotations ...”

“... everywhere else – could prove the death of America. ‘The Black and Tan’, Ellington told Stanley Dance in 1962, ‘was a speakeasy of the period where people of all races and colours mixed together.’ Ellington’s fantasy proposes music as a healing, multicultural balm, comic relief included. Nanton’s trombone horse-whinny at the end of his ...”

“... in the course of which, presumably, the flowers disintegrated, or came to dust.1 July. Watch Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, which was shot in England, the Isle of Dogs doubling for Vietnam. It’s remarkable chiefly for the language of the Marine instructor, a wonderfully written and terrible part, which takes language into areas certainly ...”