“... enthusiasms of a slightly older painter friend called Tom Phillips: the mind-expanding work of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew was followed by Morton Feldman and La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Phillips also alerted Eno to the untapped potential of tape recorders, and impressed him with a lecture using random cards and slides.All these things ...”

“... car crash, a fusion largely driven by the cult of celebrity’: just think of James Dean, Grace Kelly, Mark Bolan, President Kennedy (‘a special kind of car crash’) or Princess Diana. In 1970, shortly before he began writing the novel, Ballard decided to ‘test my hypothesis about the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by putting on an ...”

“... We were, I later discovered, driving our way through a book I hadn’t read at the time: John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, wherein the author and his dog, Charley, lit out on the back roads of America in the fall of 1960, in a new GM pickup, in order to ‘rediscover this monster land’. Steinbeck is precise and prescient about ...”

“... There is often a vacancy to his acting, which can give the illusion of mystery. The producer John Foreman recalled that Newman’s second wife, Joanne Woodward, once said to him: ‘If you think he’s thinking something, he’s not always thinking something.’In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman hardly moves his eyes when he speaks – only his mouth. We ...”

“... indeed; and the England team never again hit the heights of 1990. When I put all this to Graham Kelly, the FA chief executive who backed the breakaway, he told me forlornly: ‘We were guilty of a tremendous collective lack of vision.’ The TV deal with BSkyB – and the BBC, for highlights – amounted to £305 million. Premier League clubs were suddenly ...”

“... introduced himself and his two colleagues of the tribunal, Justices William Hoyt of Canada and John Toohey of New South Wales, the last a member of a well-known Catholic family of lawyers, journalists and brewers. All three wore business suits and asked occasional sharp questions. Behind the bench loomed the ninety-odd volumes of Widgery Tribunal ...”

“... War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and somewhat pedestrian at times, but his authoritative command of his sources makes it ...”

“... of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America, Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so ...”

“... her icy blondness, fell for Harry Belafonte, and would (she said) never trust Joan again. Grace Kelly she watched like a hawk for signs of similar leanings, and was semi-confirmed when Grace married an Eye-tie. (She herself wouldn’t touch dark chocolate even, and anyone who acquired a suntan was suspected of a touch of the tar-brush.) Once television ...”

“... of the Hutton Inquiry report into the circumstances surrounding the death of the scientist David Kelly. The report was highly critical of the BBC and, ever since, editorial controls on output have become stifling. Most editors are less concerned about what should be in a programme than with what should be left out for fear of – and this language is ...”

“... had been the chairman of Eurotunnel, was appointed to run the Strategic Rail Authority, created by John Prescott in 1999 to give direction to the privatised industry. Morton commissioned a report from Atkins and Ernst & Young to assess whether there was a need for such a line. By the time they reported in 2003, Morton – who was too outspoken to occupy such a ...”

“... ships, heaving seas, the swivelling turrets of six-inch guns; our island’s story, often with John Mills. And yet, for all its links with history, its invocation of Drake and Nelson, the grip of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist ...”

“... on Skyros: it was ‘as though one were involved in the origin of some classical myth’, F.S. Kelly, who would survive until the Somme, noted in his diary. Brooke and his fellow officers, all public schoolboys who’d studied Greek, had been carried away by the Homeric echoes of their journey: ‘Do you think perhaps the fort on the Asiatic corner will ...”

“... hated Walter Matthau, her co-star in Hello, Dolly!, and was disappointed by the director, Gene Kelly, who had no interest in her many ideas. She went around him and asked the producer to shoot her first-act closing song the way she wanted. ‘Gene admitted that my way was better when he saw the dailies. So that’s what’s in the film.’ He said later ...”

“... set’ was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use for air travel was assumed to be a ...”