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“... In his lifetime, Somerset Maugham was the most successful writer in the Anglophone world. By the time he was 90, 80 million copies of his books had been sold, he was a media celebrity and a very rich man. He had also lived, as Selina Hastings says, ‘much of his life under cover’. He went to great lengths to erase evidence of his private life, systematically destroying his personal papers, asking friends to burn his letters, and instructing his executors to discourage would-be biographers ...”

“... At the height of Steve McQueen’s fame in 1968, after a run of huge box-office successes – The Sand Pebble, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt – it was Robert Mitchum, his elder by 13 years and a star for more than twenty, who was voted the screen’s ‘godfather of cool’ on America’s university campuses. Both men had got to where they were by doing or seeming to do nothing ...”

“... The idea​ for Desert Island Discs came to Roy Plomley one night in November 1941 in the aftermath of the Blitz. Plomley was 27, an unsuccessful actor turned slightly more successful radio broadcaster. The fire in his digs had gone out, and he’d just put on his pyjamas when inspiration struck. He immediately typed out his idea and posted it the next morning to Leslie Perowne, a producer in the BBC Gramophone department: ‘DESERT ISLAND DISCS: If you were wrecked on a desert island, which ten gramophone records would you like to have with you? Providing of course that you have a gramophone and needles as well!’It was brilliantly timed ...”

“... appease the press and distance herself from soft establishment protectors and liberal apologists. Miranda Carter astutely observes that the sensational exposure deflected mounting demands to investigate MI5 and was therefore as politically convenient as the earlier immunity had been.For weeks after Thatcher’s announcement, Blunt was hunted by the press ...”

“... of war in 1914 looks rather like the culmination of a family feud. As its subtitle suggests, Miranda Carter’s intelligent, entertaining and informative book folds dynastic and political narratives into a panoramic account of Europe’s road to war. The first and most successfully handled of her themes is the saga of the three cousins, Willy, Nicky ...”

“... heroine, Dorinda, with Hippolito, a male juvenile lead of equal springtime guilelessness. While Miranda knows only Prospero and Caliban, and barely remembers her mother, neither Dorinda nor Hippolito has ever seen any other member of the opposite sex. Hippolito finds that Prospero left behind a single book, overlooked when he drowned his library. It’s a ...”

“... Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was ...”