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“... to make a film there.’He would need a further saviour. His rough cut was shown to Margaret Booth, nearly seventy, who had worked for D.W. Griffith, and on Garbo pictures, and on Mutiny on the Bounty. She supervised the editing, gave John a few notes, all of which he acted on, then sat through another screening with the MGM suits, who did their idiot ...”

“... In Moro’s daughter’s case, the call – also the last she will get – comes from a public booth in Rome’s Termini station. She must understand that there is now no more time: the decision has just been taken to kill her father. There must be some political intervention. ‘It is a political problem,’ says the caller. The caller seems ...”

“... A woman threw her glass of wine at me,’ James Lasdun’s second novel begins. At a party held by a wealthy philanthropist in New York, a woman walks up to the narrator and asks: ‘Excuse me, are you Stefan Vogel?’ He says yes; she flings her wine in his face. In keeping with the novel’s mood of dreamlike self-absorption, the event is replayed many times ...”

“... hidden morphine tablets: ‘the entire action was completed faster than Superman making a phone booth costume change.’ He is pitched into a torpor – ‘what a great inward laugh he laughed as he thought of it all’ – that intensifies his boyish spite. Jones’s prose doesn’t seem gloomy or obscure because his writing is so frequently playful, full ...”

“... like subliminal messages at the start of film reels to calibrate colours from the projection booth, to the ‘Shirley Cards’ distributed by Kodak to fulfil a similar role in commercial photography, and the first ever Photoshopped image, titled ‘Jennifer in Paradise’, which shows the then girlfriend of one of Photoshop’s creators topless on a ...”

“... of Gore Vidal. Kaplan, a professor of English in New York whose taxidermies include Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle (they hardly get deader than Carlyle), understands that it’s much easier to get the paperwork done if you don’t have the living-breathing item second-guessing you at every turn or trying to use you as a ventriloquist’s ...”

“... offer for her to play Hamlet in drag in a tent in Central Park. An American actor, Cassius Booth, appeared as her Horatio, and later as Iago to her Desdemona, which led to a triple killing, attributed to Ranulph, in a New York hotel room. So nobody would ever know whose genes had been transmitted to Melchior and Peregrine. Cassius, according to ...”

“... white witch of the Palais Royal, most earthy of oracles’) and in pieces on Updike, Balzac, Henry James, written with an authority and perception based on lifelong intimacy. He applied the same seriousness with which he encouraged new writers to reviving the careers of older ones – such as Jean Rhys – and restoring writers consigned by accident or ...”

“... rather as an early difficulty that had to be overcome – one of the Union’s teething troubles. James McPherson, who has spent most of his academic life in the study of abolitionism and the related struggles of the Civil War era, has written a narrative history that comes as close to being both comprehensive and definitive as seems possible in a single ...”

“... of ‘family voting’ (sometimes prevented by polling staff), where women were led to the polling booth by men, who stood over them, or gave instructions, while they voted. Democracy Volunteers observed exactly the same behaviour, on the same day, in the elections in Northern Ireland. A year earlier, the observers had noted family voting in Scotland, where 16 ...”

“... to point out that ‘hate away’ would have sounded to Elizabethans like ‘Hathaway’; Stephen Booth added that since the word ‘and’ was regularly pronounced ‘an’, Shakespeare may be hinting in the poem’s final line that ‘Ann saved my life.’ It’s an ingenious reading, though I’m not persuaded. Germaine Greer has no ...”

“... when the Taliban took Kabul, seized him, tortured him and hanged him from a traffic policeman’s booth outside the Presidential palace. Professor Ghullam Sarwar Humayun is the former head of the Dari Department at Kabul University, a specialist in Dari epic poetry and Persian literature of the 10th and 11th centuries. A few months after the Taliban took over ...”

“... us think otherwise. Her evidence covers a wide range, from Plato and Aristotle to Proust and Henry James, and though she takes a critical interest in thinkers, mostly of the Stoic tradition, who have promoted the rival virtues of self-sufficiency, she writes to call attention to those who preach and practise sympathy. These philosophers and novelists expand ...”

“... from internet searching. Women are especially welcomed to our unique project. Please telephone James for a private friendly chat.The widow reacts more powerfully to this ad than she does to her husband’s murder. It’s not just Christopher’s infidelity – or its suggestion – that bothers her. She’s appalled by the sloppiness of the ad itself: ‘a ...”

“... This is the first full-length study of James Thomson’s life and work since Henry Salt’s in 1889. Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night is known by name to many but has seldom been reprinted or discussed. Histories of literature say more about an earlier James Thomson (1700-48) who wrote The Seasons and ‘Rule Britannia’ and got into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ...”