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“... high-profile exemplar of this style was the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is nothing new in the concept, quality tailoring bonded over primal naughtiness. It has been spelled out frequently in ...”

“... the house behind them, a miserable hut of miscellaneous logs and tarpaper. But the art historian James Curtis has shown that the reality was much less desperate. There was no dust storm: Rothstein couldn’t have shot the picture if there had been, and besides, the horizon is clearly visible. The building was a disused shack, not the family house, which ...”

“... Troubling’: that’s the word chosen by Penelope Curtis, the new director of Tate Britain, in her preface to the catalogue for Migrations, the gallery’s recently opened exhibition (it closes on 12 August). She’s referring to the name of the institution she heads. The launch of Tate Modern in 2000 gave Tate curators the thankless and well nigh incoherent task of demarcating which of their holdings belonged to a story about a specific nation and which to a story about value systems in general ...”

“... Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations – Whitechapel, Notting Hill – have recovered, but the politics have evaporated like a puddle on hot tarmac. We ...”

“... which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the vault of an outside privy. That’s the sort of court-room occasion the Victorians loved. Newspaper agitation for the commuting of death ...”

“... his context. Words weren’t his language; he spoke in action. In one of many piquant anecdotes in James Curtis’s encyclopedic new biography, on hearing the thumps as Keaton repeatedly threw himself against their common office wall at Twentieth Century Fox, the film editor Gene Fowler stuck his head into Keaton’s room. ‘What are you ...”

“... having been kidnapped, Grant (Roger Thornhill) is taken to a country house and interrogated by James Mason (Van Damme), who assumes Grant is one George Kaplan. After the bourbon and the car, Grant returns to the scene of the crime with the police, only to find all signs of his story erased. While he is trying on Kaplan’s suit in the hotel room, the phone ...”

“... days. In biographies deeds tend to outstrip loves, so it’s particularly interesting that Cathy Curtis begins her Life of Hartigan, Restless Ambition, on the day she met Price. We meet Hartigan on the way up, but also, unwittingly, on her way down. If Hartigan hadn’t met Price, she wouldn’t have moved to Baltimore, which she later called ‘the disaster ...”

“... the boom spring of 1988 you would not have found a more successful, cockier City gent than Gerald James. A public school education and a distinguished career as an accountant among the big names of the City (Barings, Ansbacher, Singer and Friedlander, Hill Samuel) had prepared him perfectly for his chairmanship of Astra, a burgeoning, middle-ranking arms and ...”

“... for a divorce. That’s one of the embarrassments. Others include a visit from Evelyn’s father (James Hong), for whom she wishes to perform the fiction of a happy family; a sulky gay daughter (Joy, played by Stephanie Hsu), who doesn’t understand the social advantages of being straight; and an evil tax officer (Jamie Lee ...”

“... It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to be stupid: his father told him he was destined to ...”

“... like the Kraken; the poem is here a Mort and there a Morte. Max Beerbohm’s parody of Henry James is readily and roughly transcribed: for ‘caught in her tone’, read ‘caught her tone’; for ‘feverish’, read ‘feverishly’; for ‘physically’, read ‘psychically’ ... Mis-spelling, mis-punctuation and misquoting are much in evidence. In ...”

“... of the sentences seem tackier than it would in a Chandler story. Somewhere in the background is James M. Cain, the author of the novel on which the film is based. And the actual writer here, the one who finally approved the words even if he didn’t compose them, is Billy Wilder, the director of the film, and co-author of the script. ‘He was a ...”

“... the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first biography of Hardwick, has the opportunity to set this right, to begin at the beginning.Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, the eighth of eleven children. Her siblings became teachers, post-office ...”

“... it, forming Socialisme ou barbarie with a congeries of radicals which eventually included C.L.R. James and the Sino-American, Grace Lee Boggs; free of the French Communist Party, he managed to avoid embroilment in the latter’s dizzying volte-fesses, chronicled by Sartre in Les Mains sales. He sided with the Algerian rebels against his adopted homeland and ...”