“... fashionable to do so, she looked bendable, bone and muscle fluid like a cat’s. A swathe of flax-white hair protruded from a twist of felt, and underneath was something not quite true. Exquisite bone hid under delicate faintly painted flesh, each tone subtly emphasising and leading up to the wide eyes, lighter than Scandinavian blue and deeper than Saxon ...”

“... at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite imposing, with the box-office generally at the ...”

“... productionist, autarchic programme’ that was basically complementary to Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ agenda. It was, however, profoundly out of step with the European Community Britain had joined in 1973. The economist Stuart Holland, the brains behind the AES, quickly came to feel that it had become too statist and dirigiste, not focused enough on ...”

“... other writers.’ As Gelpi rightly points out, Day Lewis did always have his defenders. Early on, Michael Roberts claimed that From Feathers to Iron (1931) was ‘a landmark, in the sense in which Leaves of Grass, A Shropshire Lad, Des Imagistes and The Waste Land were landmarks’. And on the occasion of his death, Kingsley Amis declared that Day ...”

“... bibliographers, theatre-historians, Marxists, historicists new and old. Some wretched ‘white British Shakespearean scholar’, scourged in half a paragraph for a lifetime’s imperception, is well on his chastened way back to the sulphurous and tormenting flames before I realise that he bears my own name. This is Bardbiz, nor are we out of ...”

“... England aristocrats. He stands with his hands behind him, and in one of his fists – ‘a large, white, well-shaped fist’ – he has crumpled a pair of dirty dog-skin gloves. The three men dribble away the time with slightly irritating badinage – they chat about their health, about being bored, about marriage and what might constitute ‘an interesting ...”

“... to look for ways of remaining unapologetically gay writers without writing ‘gay novels’. Michael Cunningham won a large readership with The Hours, in which gay lives featured without being allowed to predominate, though his touch seems less sure in his most recent offering, By Nightfall. A narrative about a married man’s brief and inconclusive ...”

“... with millions of ordinary families’. It comes as no surprise to find that he proposed the ‘white heat of technology’ wheeze to Wilson as a campaign theme for 1964, though Crossman’s own ignorance of scientific matters was as near-complete as one could wish. From 1964 to 1970 we all know the story – the fetishisation of sterling, the corporate ...”

“... These limitations become more apparent when Hitchens writes about the Left. He tears into Michael Foot for his ‘treacly exaggerations’, his awful sentimentality, his Beaverbrook-worship and his ‘glutinous style’. Fine. But the fact that his general angle of attack on Foot is from the left, and his judgment that Foot ‘has never been otherwise ...”

“... an attack on a German town the mayor of which was persuaded to organise a surrender. After the white flag went up an enemy tank opened fire, ‘so I shot the mayor and withdrew.’ Haines cites this as an example of the ruthlessness which enabled Max well to mention the incident ‘casually to his wife, without apparently wondering whether she might think ...”

“... dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become an alienated, albeit highly lucrative profession rather than a sport. The game’s most flamboyant and most ...”

“... arrived in Buenos Aires, hoping to fly on across the Andes, there was good news and bad. Michael Brunson and John Humphrys had hired a large plane from Aerolineas Argentinas, on behalf of ITN and the BBC, and they were leaving for Santiago late that night. The new Chilean authorities had promised to open the frontier the following morning, and for a ...”

“... rose into triple figures. Successively onto the scene came such butch illuminati as Miller, Michael Frayn and Peter Cook, with results that Mr Hewison obviously finds it much less uncomfortable to write about, even if it simultaneously becomes more difficult to trace the thread. These were and are real individuals, less easily subsumed into a ...”

“... Boy’, ‘Old Cumberland Beggar’), and in 1800 (‘The Brother’, ‘Home at Grasmere’, ‘Michael’), and would do so again in ‘The Waggoner’ of 1806, but in the periods that produced the great poetry of imagination (late 1798 and 1799, 1802, 1804-5), true fellow-feeling is very rare. The Prelude has its moments – Ann Tyson asleep on her bible ...”

“... the saints who visited her, when, for instance, she was pressed at her trial to specify whether St Michael wore wings or not. What Miss Warner emphasises, however, is that her experience was not of mystical rapture, but had a mundane, realistic bearing: she was being instructed to leave Domrémy and undertake a mission for her bleeding country, and this ...”