“... 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got ...”

“... the final years of public fame, culminating in Frost’s reading of ‘The Gift Outright’ at the Kennedy Inauguration and his meeting with Khrushchev in Russia. The problem for any contemporary biographer is that Lawrance Thompson is the only source for much of Frost’s life; his biography (backed by the two thousand pages of his manuscript ‘Notes on ...”

“... last month, has him playing an American Secret Service man haunted by his failure to protect John Kennedy on the day everyone remembers. Now another assassin, John Malkovich no less, is stalking another President: a risk for the incumbent but a chance of redemption for our hero. The regrets on the subject of violence are particularly murky. ‘Penance’ was ...”

“... that Lee Harvey Oswald saw The Manchurian Candidate, which was released in 1962, a year before Kennedy’s assassination. A more plausible cinematic influence on him is Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays a President’s assassin who acquired his taste for killing in the Second World War. Yet the idea was there in The Manchurian Candidate: an ...”

“... to be considered a star in the society of Meriton; that the ‘considerable sum’ Mrs Norris gave William Price was one pound; that Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained ...”

“... in Hollywood, but none of his scripts was ever produced. He worked as a speech-writer for Robert Kennedy, a career cut short by JFK’s assassination. Recently, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in his writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This ...”

“... Culture’s got to go’ (the course, they meant – but it sounded more ominous than that). William Bennett, Secretary for Education, also came to visit the campus. He is the author of To reclaim a heritage: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (1984). Bennett thought that Western Culture had to stay and said so, face to face with Stanford’s ...”

“... election night. But at least when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley helped to deliver Illinois to John Kennedy in the narrow contest of 1960, it was not televised. (For those keeping track of our dynastic democracy, Richard was father to William, the Gore campaign head, and to Richard II, the current Chicago Mayor.) One ...”

“... despotism, requires unpacking. The stars aside, the first generation of Hollywood executives – William Fox, Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Marcus Loew, Louis B. Mayer and Adolph Zukor – were, by the 1920s, the most colourful symbols of America’s dynamic, expanding motion-picture industry; and from the 1920s till the present day, observers ...”

“... a typical case. He entered office as something of a liberal, warning the LAPD’s tyrannical chief William Parker to ‘stop making remarks about minority groups’. But then he received either a package or a personal visit from Parker – accounts vary – and switched to backing the police chief and his officers for the rest of his mayoralty. Since the ...”

“... the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony’. Reviewing a biography of Sir William Stephenson, a figure in British wartime intelligence, he declined even to list its inaccuracies: ‘To make such a charge against this biographer would be unfair. It would be like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 ...”

“... to the reckless domestic and international adventurism of his liberal successors. Admirers of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and of the dynamism of their years in office interpret the new defence of Eisenhower – correctly – as an assault on their own belief in active, affirmative government, an assault different in its origins but oddly similar in its ...”

“... minister in charge of the coal industry, was ‘a second-rate, slow-witted sheepshead’. Thomas Kennedy, a veteran Labour MP, was ‘only a walking corpse, with a faint residue of mental trouble’. The Labour peer Lord Faringdon was ‘a pansy pacifist of whose private tendencies it might be slander to speak freely’. So much for personal spite. On a ...”

“... on a par with Winston’s life of Lord Randolph for devotion and discretion. Then, in 1960, William Camp completed his ‘unofficial portrait’, which took its title, The Glittering Prizes, from one of Birkenhead’s more controversial and offensive later speeches, and pulled no punches at all. As biographies, they were both eminently readable in ...”

“... game was up. Nasser found the Reuters file admirably objective during the Suez crisis. President Kennedy first heard of Krushchev’s proposed deal over the Cuban Missile Crisis via his Reuters printer. The transformation of Reuters’ fortunes – its growth from a news service into a huge international provider of economic information, exploiting the ...”