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“... Kenneth Branagh​ ’s Belfast is set in the early months of the Troubles, in a mixed working-class district that is cleared of its Catholic residents by a loyalist mob. Paving stones are lifted to barricade the end of the street. Neighbourhood vigilantes are replaced by paramilitaries and the British army. Though the representation of events is spare and often stylised, the film catches the impact of the crisis not just on smashed and burned terraced houses but on the fabric of everyday decency ...”

“... Like all great entertainers, Coward knew how to exploit his moment. In the Thirties Cyril Connolly was complaining that his plays were ‘written in the most topical and perishable way imaginable, the cream in them turns sour overnight.’ Coward liked to call himself ‘Destiny’s Tot’, but he was England’s solid-gold jazz-baby who later turned ...”

“... of ‘an angel’: Manon was her own ‘posterity in the purist form’. When she told the writer Claire Goll that she had lost her only daughter, Goll responded, ‘But Alma … don’t you have two others as well?’ to which Alma said: ‘Yes, but those two are both half-breeds.’ In her diary, she was more merciless still about Anna, lamenting her ...”