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“... cerebral’ director, and amuse showbiz New York mightily with the statement that, after their star-crossed Romeo and Juliet on Broadway in 1940, Olivier and Vivien Leigh went to lick their wounds for a month in Vermont with ‘the Alexander Woollcotts’. The English period equivalent would be a month in the country ...”

“... the world today – globalisation – it is a shame that he spoils his case by wrapping it in the Star-Spangled Banner. His voice is born of a century or more of American exceptionalism, of the belief in America as the city on a hill to which all yearn to travel, the superpower whose fin-de-siècle worries that its imperial powers were atrophying as those of ...”

“... seem, in view of its much more spectacular neighbours like Veronese’s Family of Darius before Alexander or Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, to be a dull choice. Indeed this rather intimate picture is an exception for Bassano himself, who produced much more spectacular paintings, one of which, a tumultuous Nativity in the National Gallery of Scotland, at ...”

“... Double Falsehood was the involvement (in a manner of speaking) of another, even bigger theatrical star, for it was Theobald’s remarkable claim, teasingly publicised over the previous months, that his play was based on a hitherto unknown work by Shakespeare. ‘It is my good fortune to retrieve this remnant of his pen from obscurity,’ he says with studied ...”

“... World. The story breaks. Archer resigns as deputy chairman, but sues another tabloid, the Daily Star, for libel. The subsequent High Court action, in July, 1987, had everything. A loyal wife. A weeping prostitute. An un-English ‘sneak’ in the shape of a rich Pakistani lawyer. But most of all it had Mr Justice Caulfield, whose summing-up contained ...”

“... I could not make films’, the Stalinist proscription of Bezhin Meadow (1937) and prescriptions of Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1940-1945), the last unfinished, its second part suppressed for an unorthodox emphasis – after all this, Eisenstein had a heart attack in February 1946, and Immoral Memories is the work of his convalescence. In ...”

“... discovered to their cost. ‘Orson’s concern was entirely for Orson,’ Joan Fontaine, his co-star in Jane Eyre, remembers. James G. Stewart, the veteran dubbing mixer on Citizen Kane, describes what it was like to work with him: ‘He’d make an appointment for 8 o’clock to run rushes. He’d show up at midnight. No apologies. Just “let’s get ...”

“... Collection, along with Twiggy. O’Connor recalls tearing her hands to bleeding shreds on an Alexander McQueen creation hung all over with razor shells; ‘Oh, MAJOR!’ the make-up assistants gladly squeal. She remembers having her waist laced in to 13 inches, then loaded with a crinoline. The next day, she was covered in bruises. Blood vessels all over ...”

“... with cultural ambitions. Napoleon let no one forget that he was following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. A Commission on Sciences and Arts accompanied his troops: a corps of 151 savants, few of them out of their twenties. There were surveyors, engineers, mathematicians, printers, shipbuilders, architects, physicists, mineralogists, medics, a few ...”

“... in the wrong place. In his elegant and meditative memoir, Silent Dialogues, Nemerov’s son Alexander attempts to tease out the connections between his father’s poetry and his aunt’s photography and the tensions between their two personalities: The world for my father responded only to his intelligence … Arbus, by contrast, could see the world as ...”

“... Tsing wrote ten years ago in The Mushroom at the End of the World. They make an appearance in Star Trek: Discovery, crossing space and time and the life-death barrier; they are nature’s own revolutionary movement, subterranean, occult. They are ‘nature’s internet’, and like the internet, will survive, emitting their signals, long after all of us ...”

“... vexed questions to which it refers, and which had come to the fore in the more liberal Russia of Alexander II. In the manner that we call Chekhovian, it floats. And it may appear that its buoyancy owes a good deal to the handling of the illness which it recounts. With Chekhov, we are in the era where the word ‘nerves’ can mean something, can mean ...”

“... because it presented ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ (to quote Alexander Pope)? Or was it, perish the thought, a ‘quotation’ for the simple reason that it had appeared in earlier books of quotations, and so could be ripped off by buccaneers like Bartlett?The preface to the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary in 1979 ...”

“... day, but the OBR was set up with the explicit ambition of not doing that. In the words of Danny Alexander: ‘We set up an independent Office for Budget Responsibility because we did not want forecasts that could be interfered with by politicians, as they were in the past.’ So why does it look so much as if that’s what’s happening? A cynic would say ...”

“... must explain her hazardous use of words. She’d met Sandy, her husband, when he drove one of the Alexander buses about the town of Elgin. She happened to be the clippy on the same bus, and she would often tell me about the beauty of those single-decker vehicles (‘the Bluebird’) and the handsomeness of Sandy behind the wheel. Now she was furious all the ...”