“... Hawks blended classical narrative cinema and cinéma vérité. After all, The Big Sleep was like a home movie, made amid the dark interiors of a Warners studio; that view of intimacy has time and again shattered the supposedly imprisoning circumstances of entertainment movies. Hawks is the supreme figure of classical cinema. Because he is so unassuming an ...”

“... Home Rule for Ireland​ would have given a new parliament in Dublin far fewer powers than Holyrood has today, but the mere prospect dominated British politics for extended periods over more than three decades. Three Home Rule Bills came before Parliament, in 1886, 1893 and 1912 ...”

“... brought quite a party with you,’ Restell said.She hired an aggressive lawyer – Orlando T. Stewart, a former judge who was himself staunchly anti-abortion – who told her to ‘go home and take down your sign and if you have any recipes for pills or medicines, burn them. If you have any instruments for this evil ...”

“... Crilly (Irish Party Member for North Mayo) and Fanny Parnell (patriotic poet and sister of Charles Stewart) take on an almost fictive existence, like characters in a novel. Herbert Horne and Yeats’s view of him, Yeats’s ‘hushed, musical, eerie’ manner of speaking on that night in Southwark, as well as Crilly’s recent trial on a political charge, all ...”

“... ideal is the green room of the Gaiety [Theatre]’, and who, in pursuit of promotion at home, thought nothing of butchering men who were fighting to defend a ‘thousand years of freedom’. If the soldiers seemed lacking in imagination, the journalists who accompanied the expeditions more than made up for it. Bennet Burleigh, their doyen, had a ...”

“... its name chiselled into a monument like a rounded milestone – Clan Chattan, Clan Cameron, Clan Stewart. Firs stand about like dark angels. The place seems to have its own weather – permanently overcast ... Blink: October 1990: bound for Hatchards in Inverness to promote a book on people’s hereditary memories of the Clearances, we take the press officer ...”

“... They Drove Old Dixie Down’) or Cait O’Riordan from the Pogues crooning, ‘My name is Jock Stewart, I’m a canny gun man’ (from the traditional ‘I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day’). Joan Baez’s contralto can, if you squint your ears, pass as a farm-boy tenor; Cait O’Riordan’s chalky delivery might be that of a rich ponce.Their trip is ...”

“... to add its note to the judgment in the case of Colin Middleton. To defend the status quo as the Home Office did after the Middleton inquest was to reckon without the Human Rights Act, which was passed by Parliament in November 1998 and brought into law nearly two years later. In early 2004 Mrs Middleton finally got what she wanted: the law lords ruled that ...”

“... another film based on Elizabeth’s life. Young Bess had Jean Simmons in the lead. Hemmed in by Stewart Granger as Thomas Seymour and Charles Laughton reprising his prewar role as Henry VIII, there isn’t much Simmons can do beyond tossing her hair and striking a curious hands-on-hips Holbeinesque pose to suggest that there is more to her defiance than ...”

“... say it: the editor of the Shinbone Star says it after hearing Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) tell the true story of the man who shot Liberty Valance. A false legend and its political consequences are again the issue here. Did Ford agree with the newspaper editor’s line? ‘Yes,’ he replied when asked in an interview, ‘because I think ...”

“... friend who preceded him to the grave. The blood-stained final letter which Julian Grenfell sent home from Flanders ran: We are practically wiped out but we charged and took the Hun trenches yesterday. I stopped a Jack Johnson with my head, and my skull is slightly cracked. But I’m getting on splendidly. I did awfully well. Grenfell died slowly enough ...”

“... Orange Grove in St Martin’s Lane. After plays and concerts, he was happy with eggs and cocoa at home. The tiny, painstaking reckonings at the end of each day grind on one’s nerves as they must have on his. You can feel his exhilaration when, with his share of the insurance paid at his father’s death in 1885, he walks out to be measured for his first ...”

“... This last week I finish reading Common Ground by Rob Cowen and The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, both books about wildernesses, Stewart’s in Afghanistan, Cowen’s in almost comical contrast in and around Harrogate. As he tells the story Stewart seems in regular peril of his ...”

“... to the sunlight they will keep their colour.’ Isabella Beeton, for all her carefulness and her Home Doctor’s ABC, died of puerperal fever at the age of 28, after several miscarriages and one successful delivery. Biographers suggest that her husband, Samuel Orchard Beeton, the founder and publisher of the Boy’s Own Paper, had contracted syphilis from a ...”

“... in the last two decades. This is an ‘in’ book for ‘in’ people Events abroad have brought home the good fortune of Scotland and England in having their mutual frontier established several centuries ago, and so being spared brutality, bombs and international hoodwinking. Some sociologists hold that the Scottish economy is so closely blended into that ...”