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“... eager to emulate the grandeur of their grandfathers. So it was quite a good idea for Jonathan Guinness (Nancy’s nephew) and his daughter Catherine to begin The House of Mitford with long chapters about the two grandfathers. Bertie (pronounced ‘Bartie’) Mitford and Thomas ‘Tap’ Bowles were both tremendous ...”

“... which has been on Apple TV+ since last year (two books down, six and counting to go). Alec Guinness inhabited the role of Smiley so completely in the 1970s BBC version of Tinker Tailor and its sequel that it’s always slightly surprising (to me, anyway) when le Carré’s novels describe him as short, fat and balding. Oldman’s too smart an actor to ...”

“... if Tom Hanks is funnier in that film than our idea of Tom Hanks ought to allow, he’s not Alec Guinness. And what about Intolerable Cruelty (2003), with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, which doesn’t look like a Coen Brothers movie because it doesn’t look as if it was directed by anybody? Still, they can’t ...”

“... airport in the early days of air travel to defrost pilots arriving from across the Atlantic. Even Guinness is no longer locally owned. As with most myths, there is a kernel of truth to the notion of Ireland as a breeder of fantasies. Culture – from Bono to Brian Friel, Heaney to Riverdance – is modern Ireland’s most remarkable export. There is a small ...”

“... so have nine out of 11 factories. Are we really facing the end of liquorice torpedoes, pistols, Catherine wheels, bootlaces and old boots? The author knows better than to try to nominate the most popular sweet in history, but the Guinness Book of Records used to give the award to America’s Life Savers. A calculation ...”

“... It’s the home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now well-established red kites tumbling about the sky above the Harewood estate, home these days ...”

“... from revealing that her late son, Sebastian, was homosexual. It features a 27-year-old Taylor as Catherine Holly looking almost impossibly beautiful in a range of outfits, including a chest-hugging dark sundress and a clinging white one-piece swimming costume. Her character’s beauty is central to the plot because in the flashback sequences we learn that ...”

“... Ní Dhuibhne’s compilation of memoirs, Look! It’s a Woman Writer! ‘Thirty years ago,’ Catherine Dunne remembers, ‘we had the infamous Field Day Anthology, which arrogantly excluded the writings of most women: but that was then.’So​ what is now? Repeated, high-profile exclusions, such as the almost complete absence of women dramatists and ...”