Search Results

“... up again, like Troy from beneath a sea of sand and the ruins of many lesser cities with the same name. But if a conspiracy theory is preferred, there is always the chance that the feminist cheerleaders, far from being unaware of the fact that Hollywood had once projected female equality, were aware of it but didn’t want to emphasise it, lest they kick a ...”

“... was ‘formidable’ between 40 and 60, and felt fine in his sixties. Now he can’t remember the name of the pills he’s supposed to take for his diabetes, he starts to do a sum and can’t remember what he has just multiplied by what. He feels dizzy at times. He says all this with genuine impatience and distaste, but also with an energy which comes out as ...”

“... fistfights to practise for the coming revolution. ‘The first time Murray got hit by a cop with a billy club’, Biehl writes, was ‘while carrying an evicted family’s furniture back up a stairwell’. In 1939, after being expelled from the Young Communist League for criticising the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Bookchin became a Trotskyist and dropped out of high ...”

“... house, a larger-than-life man called Vautrin, is suspected to be a seasoned criminal by the name of Jacques Collin, who has escaped from prison. The policeman lets slip that Vautrin ‘took the rap for another man’s crime, a forgery committed by an extremely handsome young man he was fond of’. Then he tells Michonneau that they need to get close to ...”

“... are a nation of stingy book-lovers, and the members of the London Library are as British as the name suggests. They want their million old books, their thousands of new titles annually, their full range of current journals, their smart West End address, their expert staff – all on the cheap. The full subscription of £80 a year is if anything a better ...”

“... cases with which Ginzburg deals, confessed to having attended the sabbat, to having ridden on a billy goat, to having sold his soul to the Devil. (The Inquisitors themselves, however, came to suspect the veracity of these statements, all of them extracted under torture, and Olivo, who then denied everything he had previously said, claiming the only act he ...”

“... diminished surrealism of the Dreamland funfair, to dismiss such transitory cultural pretenders as Billy Childish (‘a hundred records, all bad’) and Dame Tracey Emin. They peddle bad memories of the Estuary, Chatham and Margate, for the shocked delight of bored metropolitans (who never have to go there). Seabrook lives it, thrives on the way he’s been ...”

“... exposure of Rae’s bottom is arousing,’ Thomson notes.) There it is again, pink and bare, in Billy Bathgate, where she is the moll of Dustin Hoffman’s hopelessly unconvincing gangster boss (1991). And again in that schlocky piece of nonsense, Malice (1993), where she works in a childcare centre and wears ‘baggy jeans and flannel shirts’ by day but ...”

“... from Paris in 1952 when the aeroplane – ‘it was an Air France: Air Chance is a better name’ – ‘caught fire and scenes of extraordinary panic occurred’. Berlin mentions this, jokily and in passing, in several letters, but Alice James, the wife of William James’s son Billy, gets the full story of the ...”

“... Palace. So the president of the board, John Cam Hobhouse, decided to send the presents back. King Billy didn’t mind a bit. He roared with laughter at the idea that he might have accepted the stuff. The elephants were sent off to various English zoos and the horses to the royal stud, on the grounds that it was unfair to subject them to another long sea ...”

“... star, all while under house arrest in an East Village apartment. Following his release from jail, Billy McFarland, the man behind Fyre Festival (where attendees expecting luxury were put up in disaster relief tents as opposed to partying with celebrities on the white sands of the Bahamas etc), announced that he was doing the same thing all over ...”

“... dumb as not to see that the two drag artists, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, were men (the director, Billy Wilder, clearly agreed with her, filming in black and white: colour would have been a giveaway). Monroe was a would-be breakout artist. ‘If I hadn’t become popular,’ she said to Weatherby, ‘I’d still be a Hollywood slave.’ The civil rights ...”

“... Julius was the original name, but one may as well call him Groucho, from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s ...”

“... the CIA and the Pentagon, on Clinton and Alan Greenspan, carrying on at the Post as well, making a name for himself as a reporter and author others wished to emulate. He’d brought down a president: journalistically, what can beat that? He’s now more famous and must be wealthier than any other newspaperman, every book a national bestseller, and so ...”

“... the CWGC’s literary adviser, called a ‘stark sword brooding on [its] bosom’. ‘Their name liveth for evermore’, a text Kipling chose from Ecclesiasticus, appears at the larger war cemeteries. Such imagery turned conscription into crusade, slaughter into sacrifice. Tezze was devastated during the First World War, which isn’t surprising, given ...”