“... of his body – and as unsafe. ‘Laurence Olivier is less gifted than Marlon Brando,’ wrote William Redfield in Letters from an Actor. ‘He is even less gifted than Richard Burton, Paul Scofield, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. But he is still the definitive actor of the 20th century. Why? Because he wanted to be.’ Holden’s book never reconciles ...”

“... ludicrously fake British accent that he reminds her of Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island. William Styron is almost as monstrous as Hellman herself: self-centred, nervy, and savage with contempt for anyone who gets in his way. When he accidentally burns the fancy pan-fried quail he is preparing for Hellman and her friends in Hellman’s kitchen one ...”

“... until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups ...”

“... the powerful Wingfield family and passed into the service of Edward IV. Charles’s father was William Brandon, who according to the Paston letters got himself a bad reputation, ‘for that he should have by force ravished and swived an ancient gentlewoman, and yet was not therewith eased, but swived her oldest daughter, and then would have swived the ...”

“... wing of the CIA; J.C. King, chief of the clandestine wing’s Western Hemisphere Division; and William Hood, at that time chief of operations under King. Roman said she didn’t know why the 10 October cable made no mention of the FBI reports, but guessed (in Morley’s words) they ‘may have been circulating in other CIA offices and been unavailable to ...”

“... was that woman. She dressed for court in a blue serge dress with a long grey cloak over it and a white chrysanthemum pinned to her breast. ‘She was the perfect witness,’ Humphreys wrote. ‘Neat and tidy in her appearance, polite and respectful in her answers, with just that twinge of feeling to be expected in a person who knows herself to be the victim ...”

“... editors, ‘I wish to point out to you, an editor of the New Yorker,’ he writes to Katharine White, ‘that Mr West’s review of Augie March is disgraceful … Let us hope that it is only my mental health that is endangered and not that of your readers as well.’ Two weeks later, he is putting on his best shirt for Lionel Trilling. ‘The many ...”

“... and fathers, husbands and wives, daughters and sons; they usually sound like upper-middle-class white people, probably well educated, perhaps artists, writers, academics, translators. She writes about people from her world, the people we expect that she knows. The characters are usually anonymous, but they are never archetypes, they are never meant to ...”

“... colourful local characters the narrator meets along the way. This is true of Steinbeck, Kerouac, William Least Heat-Moon in his Blue Highways and so on. Even the insufferable Henry Miller, in his 1945 volume The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, has his unrelieved bombast interrupted by a mechanic in Albuquerque called Dutter. The Maestro and I weren’t doing ...”

“... sublime emotions. In her Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), Anna Seward quoted a ‘Mr White’ from the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1786 who said ‘the style of the sonnet should be nervous, and, where the subject will with propriety bear elevation, sublime.’ Mary Robinson (described by Coleridge as ‘a woman of undoubted genius’, but perhaps ...”

“... Isis because of its violence. It’s an unusual turnabout: Downing Street more hawkish than the White House. But perhaps that’s of little consequence. In a remarkably frank articulation of London’s subservience to Washington, William Hague said in response to the Isis advances: ‘We will support the United States in ...”

“... as revealing as they seem. He may have been inspired by the multiple narrators of The Woman in White: like witnesses presenting their evidence the characters contradict and expose themselves. Agatha Christie’s famously unfair mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is written as a diary, proving just how unreliable ‘honest’ narrators can be. Sayers ...”

“... seems briefly possible that Ishiguro is setting out to re-create a vanished set of perceptions, as William Golding did with his Neanderthals in The Inheritors. Lok, Mal, Nil and the others had pictures in their minds, and some way of sharing them, though they lacked language. Beatrice and Axl are in the opposite predicament, with language available but a ...”

“... into a commonwealth of nations, Wilson’s nose was put out of joint and the mood in the White House was said to be ‘depressed’. Nevertheless the US emerged in a very strong position when the end of the war finally came. Wilson, without properly consulting his allies, dictated the nature and content of the armistice negotiations with ...”

“... an assiduous treasurer of the Liberal Club, and his subsequent gruelling stint as an assistant to William Beveridge was a formative professional and political experience; they parted company just before Beveridge started work on the report that appeared, to unexpected public jubilance, in 1942. By then Wilson had joined the cohort of clever young men ...”