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“... in mind when considering these four books, all of which show the industry in dire need of reform. Stanley Adams is an Oxford graduate of Maltese descent who, following sudden imprisonment, lost his wife, his earning power and nearly all his material possessions. He now lives on supplementary benefit in a small London flat, with the rent paid by the ...”

“... far from exciting. Yet he may have been more important than posterity has allowed. R.J.Q. Adams makes that case quietly but firmly. He was, on the face of it, an unusual choice for Party leader. To begin with, he was middle-class, a businessman with interests in metal and banking, when the Party hierarchy and backbenches were still overwhelmingly ...”

“... Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and chilly distance from London society, managing to seem both unformed and overly formal; the Confederate envoy James Mason says ‘chaw’ for ‘chew’, calls himself ‘Jeems’ and offends British officials with his crude racist ...”

“... to play the psychologist, Lady Donaldson is to be preferred. The authors assert, for example, that Stanley Baldwin disliked Edward VIII from the beginning, implying that he was determined from the beginning to be rid of him. They quote no authority in defence of their view. The Prime Minister’s niece Monica Baldwin’s An Unpublished Page of History cannot ...”

“... us to an altogether more elevating conversation between C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (There is, as Cavell nicely describes it, a raging ‘thirst for talk’ in all these films.) We are hearing about the natural aristocracy that democracy needs. We are hearing about how to find what Matthew Arnold called one’s ...”

“... limits of diversity during the 12th century. In a footnote, he produces a quotation from Henry Adams which is the keynote of the whole volume: ‘The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence and rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new social mind.’ Professor Constable ...”

“... a direct and lucid account of Hepburn’s career, from early films such as Little Women and Alice Adams, through the comedies with Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, notably Bringing Up Baby and Adam’s Rib, to The African Queen and then Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and On Golden Pond, into the story of his many talks and weekends with her, and he has a great ...”

“... in a camper van with his second wife, an Italian countess whom he married in September 1968. Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange made him notorious in 1971, though Burgess groused throughout his later life that Kubrick distorted the novel and that anyway the book itself was peripheral to his output. His hyper-Tolstoyan verbal productivity made ...”

“... the grinning blackface mask as if it represented the authentic black, and Ellison’s friend Stanley Edgar Hyman was among those who were taken in. He thought that ‘the “darky” entertainer’ was an invention of black folklore rather than white supremacist fantasy; worse, he detected the influence of minstrelsy in Invisible Man. For Ellison, on the ...”

“... Eliot and Pound were both bricoleurs, but they were purposeful: the great chunks of Jefferson and Adams and Confucius that find their way into The Cantos illustrate Pound’s version of history, and are intended to show how the chaos of the present might be redeemed if we could only be led to make sense – his sense, that is – of the past. But not all ...”

“... contrived by Robert Rigg as part of a GLC initiative in the 1960s had turned sour by the time of Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange in 1971. Dystopian violence overcame the innocence of Corbusier-influenced architects and planners hoping for a brutalist iteration of the Unité d’habitation. Blocks named after the great and good of reforgotten ...”

“... it should have some ‘chastening influence … on the self-confidence of mankind’, and Henry Adams likened the news to the foundering of the Republican Party: ‘the sum and triumph of civilisation … our greatest achievement sinks at a touch … Nature jeers at us for our folly.’ The sinking of the Titanic very quickly seemed freighted with ...”

“... territory, but with another curious turn. For this strange emotion – what Douglas Adams might have called ‘the long toothache of the soul’ – isn’t a late 20th-century Hollywood add-on, but Tolkien himself, through and through. He theorised it in his 1938 lecture ‘On Fairy-Stories’ as ‘a fleeting glimpse of Joy beyond the walls of ...”