“... the gnawing anxiety about his standing one has to remember that he began as the whitest of British white hopes. Being the youngest undergraduate at Oxford for centuries (though he did not stay the course) was less significant than creating the score for the Sitwellian Façade at 19. It would take several decades for this masterpiece to achieve its final form ...”

“... young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around. The service in the village church in the afternoon is packed. I give an address but the whole occasion is wonderfully and ...”

“... He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy jacket and the wide-collared white shirt, open to the sternum. He holds a book, closed around his index finger, which is still marking the place. It is as if he has agreed to stop reading for just a moment, so that the photo can be taken. He stares straight at the camera and his expression ...”

“... donor to the Democratic Party, told me of being invited to have dinner with Bill Clinton at the White House, where he and his wife also stayed the night. He was amazingly taken with Clinton, astounded by his warmth and intellect, and flattered by his willingness to talk policy far into the night. There is no denying the charm, but what he and so many other ...”

“... because this is the Brando we have mostly seen on screen since Apocalypse Now: in A Dry White Season (1989), for example, where he plays a South African lawyer with a heavy stylistic debt to Charles Laughton; in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), where he plays an amiable psychologist who gets to dance with Faye Dunaway; in The Score (2001), where he plays ...”

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... He did this without always making his intentions clear. O’Doherty recounts the experience of Richard O’Rawe, a former IRA member, who, having served a prison sentence for armed robbery, decided his fighting days were over and took a job in the Sinn Féin press office. O’Rawe still believed that the political campaign was a way of winning broader ...”

“... ideas they’re objecting to as much as the words. That was certainly the case in the furore over Richard Eyre’s film version of Harrison’s poem V. when it was shown on Channel Four with none of its expletives deleted.* Campaigners against the film claimed to be horrified by its vulgar tongue but the vulgarity of the author’s origins and politics were ...”

“... Linda ‘had had enough of the sexual side of marriage’, according to Brendan Gill. In their white marriage, Porter and Linda slept in separate rooms, though always nearby, with separate buildings on their estate in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and separate apartments on the 41st floor of the Waldorf Towers when they made it their residence from 1934 ...”

“... performed Eclairs sur l’ audelá.The most interesting of the single-work chapters is by Richard Steinitz on Des canyons aux étoiles, possibly because the author’s enthusiasm is tempered by doubts about the work’s total impact. ‘One has to accept,’ Steinitz says, ‘that the nature of his faith reduces the possibilities of dramatic ...”

“... swirl of colours: old gold, brown, magenta, blue. Beneath her grave lectorial face was a sharply white jabot, itself the centre of the picture around which the colours played. These were sombre: Redon was concentrating unfrivolously on his wife just as she was concentrating on her book. And then, suddenly, I saw where he had signed his homage: in tiny ...”

“... be a godfather to Private Eye, as satire and exultant disrespect returned to Britain in the 1960s. Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook – three decades younger – let him guest-edit a gorgeous special number on the Profumo scandal in 1963, in which, among other scoops, he drove Whitehall to apoplectic fury by printing the name of Sir Dick ...”

“... to restore the rule of fathers everywhere; to undo the psychic castration suffered by straight white men at the hands of invading immigrants, feminist women, ‘woke’ mobs, DEI initiatives and the democratic presumption of equality.In fact, the unconscious never left the scene. Psychoanalysis tells us that it is the unconscious that sets the scene. What ...”