“... from all quarters, the House of Lords in January’s debate has, in the memorable words of Michael Howard, presented the Government with a dog’s dinner, by passing two mutually inconsistent amendments, at the instance of Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively. There are now three options for him to consider: he can seek to push through ...”

“... is acting out in the story – will ever declare his love, or say anything, as directly as Leslie Howard does in that Western melodrama. There is a risk of cliché in this thought, but I am only following the director Ang Lee down this path, and he avoids it through cleverness. In the film moderately scrutable orientals play inscrutable orientals pretending ...”

“... of his prolific (hetero)sexual adventures: he had, says a more up-to-date historian than Rowse, Michael MacDonald, ‘a mesmerising personality and the sexual appetite of a goat’, and studded his diary with his ‘haleking’, as he put it, with an A to Z of his women, and with planning or avoiding such occasions as his consultation of the stars ...”

“... finally spilled the beans about the deal that he said had been struck with Prime Minister John Howard in 1994, whereby Howard had agreed to give up the top job after serving for a term and a half, paving the way for Costello to succeed him. Such a deal had always been rumoured, but unlike the equivalent bargain said to ...”

“... starlets to know that a really beautiful woman was rare indeed, in fact a ‘freak’. The actor Howard Duff described her as the ‘most beautiful thing he had ever seen’. To others, she was ‘an extraordinary creature’, ‘the Taj Mahal of beauty’. Or she ‘was like an animal, Ava. The sex thing.’ When ...”

“... a.m. on 18 November 1975, and was in the form of a voluntary statement, as follows: ‘I Jeffrey Howard Archer do state that I took merchandise to the value of $540, the property of the Robert Simpson Company Ltd, on November 18 1975 without paying for same and without permission.’ The details of the aforesaid Jeffrey ...”

“... of the films showing at the London Film Festival later this month is The Quiet American, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, directed by Philip Noyce, and based on Graham Greene’s novel. (It isn’t the first time the book’s been adapted for the screen: Mankiewicz made a version in 1958 which Greene, who anyway tended to have a very low opinion of ...”

“... in his crime movies, and no family friendliness as in the Godfather films. No one suffers like Michael Corleone from the anxieties of extreme power (‘If history has taught us anything, it is that we can kill anyone’). Everyone, by implication, still wants to be a gangster, but the wish is insane and not just lawless. Scorsese doesn’t deny or moralise ...”

“... 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 on to that anonymity while ...”

“... or neglected. There are ghosts and ghosts. Some of them may be more up-to-date than we are. Howard Norman’s Canadian version of pastoral, first published in America in 1987, allows us a sidelong glance at these questions. It, too, has ghosts and concerns the past, but although coolly and crisply written, it is more elegiac than either of the English ...”

“... come to suppose that everything can be done by Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and Germanic,’ he said. ‘I want it to be light, French, a soufflé.’ This confused us performers and wrecked ...”

“... but they have usually shied away from the task of tackling them editorially. Now at long last Howard Warrender has produced what promises to be the first work in a new complete edition of Hobbes’s philosophical writings. The text he has tackled is one of the most complex of all, and it is not surprising to learn that his painstaking work on it took ...”

“... of, among other films, Ben-Hur, Flesh and the Devil, The Merry Widow and A Night at the Opera, and Howard Hughes, aviator and solitary. And Hitchcock, of course: ‘the only poète maudit to be successful’. Hitchcock succeeded, we learn, where Alexander, Julius Caesar and Napoleon failed: ‘in taking control of the universe’. But there is also a sense ...”

“... The general model would be something like The Big Sleep: not the Raymond Chandler novel but the Howard Hawks movie that Chandler said he couldn’t understand, although he had worked on it. This effect is relatively easy to achieve in a book since the voice is not a voiceover, it’s a textual voice. The voice could be the novel. It’s obviously not ...”

“... Soon after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to parochial schools, where he thrived ...”