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“... of the four are by Richard Usborne, the king of the traditional Wodehouse buffs. The other is by Benny Green, the new broom. Oxford University and the Pierpont Morgan Library are both relevant to Wodehouse’s life. He did not attend a university, though he would have liked to: but he has been much honoured by Oxford men. ‘Auctor magicus,’ chanted ...”

“... and discourse about the way society treats the ‘erring outcast’ (Christopher Matthew and Benny Green identify her as a Gaiety Girl drowned the previous year at Goring: ‘Jerome read a report of the tragedy in the Berkshire Chronicle and decided to incorporate it into his story’). Jerome’s most successful serious play, though few would now ...”

“... every word written today about football is quite worthless in the literary sense,’ opines Benny Green in the Spectator, and proceeds to call Tony Mason’s volume ‘by far the most profound social study of the game ever written ... faultless both in the thoroughness of its research and the commonsense with which it has been put to use’. If, on ...”

“... starting with a procession of friends, colleagues and banners before we made our way to Golders Green crematorium, the keynote speech given by Mick O’Riordan, then general secretary of the Irish Communist Party. The second took place some months later in Dublin, where I took his ashes to be buried in a plot of unconsecrated ground in Mount Pleasant ...”

“... Too early, perhaps. Madeleine Albright may have had this in mind when she said in the Fox News green room last month: ‘Do you suppose that the Bush Administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?’ She claims that she was joking; Fox journalist Mort Kondracke, however, thinks she can’t have been ...”

“... have to sharpen-up their act. Working for Lew Grade’s ATV with the writers Dick Hills and Sid Green, they subtly altered the relationship between the stage personae of Eric and Ern. Over the course of six series between 1961 and 1968 something developed between the pair that made them look less like an act and more like a relationship. Bruce Forsyth ...”

“... guard and the woman taking care of the migrant boy, whom she has left waiting for her in her car. Benny’s Video (1992) begins with a videotape of the slaughter of a pig, which is then rewound and replayed in slow motion: this is a video Benny has made, and he watches it again and again. ...”

“... I glanced out of the window at the suburban sprawl scattered like so much confetti over the gnarly green terrain. In the distance, the tall white cluster of buildings that formed downtown Los Angeles poked through a corona of smog. Coming into view below was my destination: the 480-acre subdivision established in 1887 and named ‘Hollywood’ by a real estate ...”

“... and finished work (he’s writing an organ concerto). Meanwhile the tortured bridge designer Benny rhapsodises about some technical drawings done by a one-time employee, so accomplished that they make something unbuilt seem to attain a plane higher than physical reality: ‘Every tension was perfect, the balance was perfect, you can look at those bridges ...”

“... Revue Française’s Proust, a winter treat for when the ice on the Danube had turned dark grey-green, and the postman wore foot-cloths and felt boots. Why the burst of sensibility? Because during the winters, when the family were trapped in the house, it seems that for Melchior’s father the postman’s packages made landmarks. In 1919, the year Melchior ...”

“... high above the tannin scum: leathery seaweed, wads of yellow paper. They tiptoe out, speeded-up Benny Hill, over sharp stones, to neat piles of folded clothes. The watched, towelled down and returned to their balconies, rusting rails and anti-gull devices, become the watchers. A slow-motion cinema of such tender boredom that they will never move ...”

“... need to rid Palestine of Palestinians became all the more urgent after Israel expanded beyond the Green Line. Segev explored the topic in 1967: Israel, the War and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. His findings were based on an extensive review of Israeli state archives, but he makes no mention of Paraguay. Neither does the Israeli scholar and ...”

“... exactly the problem then faced by popular artists of talent: the dearth of first-rate songs. Benny Goodman, the only contemporary of Waller’s who recorded more than he did, employed the best arrangers to make truly poor dance numbers sound perfectly mediocre. Even if Waller could have summoned the discipline to write more songs as fine as his ...”

“... I accepted it … I walked the Paris streets under the rainbow glory of the lamps, walked on night-green grass and over pavements shining like diamonds.’ This is from The Philistines (1949): ‘She shivered a little in the chilly young air of the day … All sensation was beautiful, even to the movement of a finger, the flutter of a lash … Having doubted ...”

“... Robert Benchley, who wrote that Perelman did to our weak little efforts at ‘crazy stuff’ what Benny Goodman has done to middle-period jazz. He swung it. To use a swing phrase, he took it ‘out of this world’. And there he remains, all by himself.’ Acres and Pains really only recycles the most time-honoured of jokes about the bewildered townsman ...”