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“... as villains. The star of London Weekend Television’s new Once a thief? is 22-year-old Michael Baillie, who began his criminal career as a burglar at the age of eight, and served his first borstal sentence at the age of 15. According to the Sunday Times, he originally wanted to play football for Aston Villa, but now he’s thinking of taking acting ...”

“... between women is one of the striking motifs in Fanny Hill’s main sequence: the sequence in Mrs Cole’s brothel, where Fanny is most thoroughly a ‘woman of pleasure’, living with no thought but that of giving and receiving as much sexual gratification as she can (although she does not join Mrs Cole’s extraordinary ...”

“... picture, and Hepburn says, ‘Oh, I see; you’re one of those,’ and recalls the visits of Cole Porter, who would ‘straighten pictures for five minutes before he’d even sit down’. There are some fine set pieces. There is a Parcheesi game at Hepburn’s house in Connecticut, where Hepburn, who hates to lose, blames her defeat on having Berg as a ...”

“... and castrated in consequence: a romantic figure, like say Tchaikovsky, in an age of epics. Michael Clanchy’s life of him is too serious to count as romance, and too witty to be epic. He writes extremely well, and matches with a wide and happy learning, which runs from Socrates to Eliot and from Cole Porter to ...”

“... on human rights in the reworked US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Or Michael Posner, the founder of Human Rights First, now a business professor at NYU, who, as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour in Obama’s first term, helped bury the Goldstone Report, commissioned by the United Nations to ...”

“... Francisco in the late 1970s, often hanging out with Thom, Mike and their ‘queer household’ on Cole Street. Sometimes he stayed there. He called Gunn and Kitay his ‘role models’, admiring the fact they had stayed together for so long, and built a household of friends and lovers. Noseworthy was often in San Francisco with the Creative Power ...”

“... totalling eleven hundred pages, a fact which would have undoubtedly pleased their subject. Both Michael Newman’s ‘Political Biography’ and Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman’s ‘A Life on the Left’ rightly insist on their man’s public face. But even his political life was peculiar, if only because this profoundly political man never became a ...”

“... frivolous to sober eyes. But there would be a real liberation in it too. If we wanted to refer to Cole Porter or Philip Marlowe or Lassie, we could do it without being suspected of trying for the popular touch; if we came across Thomas Aquinas, we wouldn’t have to pretend we found the thought in an old cookbook. This may sound utopian (or ...”

“... and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating ...”

“... sixty-four miles an hour. The Ducati 916 is a nightingale. It sings to me more sweetly than Cole Porter. Slender as a girl, aerodynamically clean. Sudden as a shark. Seidel’s first book, Final Solutions, caused a minor scandal when it was chosen to receive a small award from the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in 1962. The ...”

“... which was nominated for six Oscars and made more than $600 million. The little boy in the film, Cole Sear (played with audience-beguiling depth by Haley Joel Osment), sees dead people who don’t know they’re dead, and when the film came out it was not merely a success on every front, but, like every success of that sort, caused people to see it as ...”

“... was boredom. Most people were interesting first time round. ‘Wednesday 9 July 1941: Lunched with Michael Foot, whom I liked very much. He hated and hates Chamberlain even more than I. His views, though a trifle too leftist, are sound.’ But they did not turn out to be permanently palatable. ‘Friday 3 October 1952: After dinner we watched a political ...”

“... II – on the balcony of one, Hyman Roth slices up a birthday cake with a frosting map of Cuba as Michael Corleone and other Mob chieftains look on – or from the classic Soviet-era agitprop film I Am Cuba, in which rich Americans frolic around rooftop swimming-pools. Meantime, a few storeys below, a revolution looms. These relics are the hotels the Mob ...”

“... In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel ...”

“... much harder to talk about, or illustrate. In All the Pretty Horses, the year is 1949. John Grady Cole is 16, his grandfather has just died, his parents are separated, his girlfriend has found someone else. He leaves his home in San Angelo, Texas and takes off with a friend for Mexico. They meet up with another, even younger boy riding a fine horse he has ...”