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“... the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County has John Wayne. Orange County, where unfettered individualism rises from a government-subsidised foundation in mineral wealth, agribusiness, aerospace and real-estate speculation. When John Wayne ...”

“... a habit of dropping his trousers and removing his clothes when provoked and, famously, peeing on David O. Selznick’s carpet (in the middle of a meeting about a film version of A Doll’s House). He was articulate and rude to journalists, which also generated copy. ‘Booze, broads, all true,’ he told hacks. ‘Make up some more if you want to.’ Mitchum ...”

“... at once. In the course of her life she tells us that she met Lloyd George, Beaverbrook, Jackie Kennedy and ‘every single postwar prime minister, from Clement Attlee (whom I met at the theatre) to David Cameron’, as well as other ‘formidable and extraordinarily interesting people, despite being rather dull ...”

“... like Dover, where immigration politics always matter, but at the Romsey by-election Charles Kennedy made such a point of his comparatively liberal attitude to asylum-seekers that hardly any voter could have been unaware that asylum-seeking was an electoral issue. Although psephological wisdom has it that the Conservative defeat was due to ‘local ...”

“... that Lee Harvey Oswald saw The Manchurian Candidate, which was released in 1962, a year before Kennedy’s assassination. A more plausible cinematic influence on him is Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays a President’s assassin who acquired his taste for killing in the Second World War. Yet the idea was there in The Manchurian Candidate: an ...”

“... mysterious. But it surely cries out for more commentary when Didion recalls that as the deaths of Kennedy and Lee Oswald were being shown on television, Eduene remarked: Well, Oswald and Ruby had ‘every right’ to do as they did. That is an alarming mother to be uncertain of. That is more than being right of centre. That is something like giving up the ...”

“... old guard welcomed him and gave him unexpected responsibility in the form of committee seats. Ted Kennedy was responsible for Biden’s social initiation, taking him to the steam room in the Senate gym, where he met Jacob Javits of New York and Stuart Symington of Missouri: ‘They were standing there, two feet away from me, reaching out to shake my hand. And ...”

“... But many conservatives (Bennett among them) thought that Stanford’s President, Donald Kennedy, had caved in too readily to radical ‘intimidation’, and a number of journalists were excited by images of blacks lynching Western Culture. The lay public had also been made aware at around the same time that something sinister called Deconstruction ...”

“... Medieval Europe occasionally looms up in the modern imagination, sometimes deliriously as in John Kennedy Toole’s feverish vision (in his novel, Confederacy of Dunces) of Hrotsvitha’s reactions to TV, and of Boethius’s involvement in a porno racket, and sometimes with a more serious resonance as in Geoffrey Hill’s poems on Offa. Mr Leyser matches Hill ...”

“... fanclubs of Nerdley where all the housewives are violent supporters of different members of the Kennedy-Onassis family. Sometimes ‘Peter Simple’ is a warrior chief, defending columnar territory against incursions from the public-school and masonic gatherings on the north-west frontier (under ‘Court and Social’) or the coded messages from ...”

“... further than anybody else’s. (Eleven of the 12 men who walked on the Moon had been Boy Scouts.) Kennedy’s ambition to land a man on the Moon was sold as a raid on the new frontiers, but the spectre of Soviet domination of the heavens stalked the American mind, and the Age of Dread drew great sustenance from competing lunar missions. ‘The Apollo ...”

“... of Sea Power upon History (1890), we might stress the derring-do of the Royal Navy, or – as Paul Kennedy did recently – the role of public finance. Brewer concentrates on organisational factors, and isolates three that were crucial. First and foremost, Britain’s army and navy trebled in size in the century after the Glorious Revolution. By the 1740s, the ...”

“... rigidly stratified nation. The BBC bureaucrats, for their part, looked on the likes of Potter and David Mercer, Peter Nichols and David Rudkin as the means of fulfilling their commitment to public service broadcasting, which, of necessity included ‘the arts’. Somewhere in between, the executive producer Sydney ...”

“... named for a person whose name we don’t recognise: ‘Bill Lawton’, ‘Ernst Hechinger’, ‘David Janiak’. ‘Bill Lawton’, a secret name uttered by children playing in their rooms, turns out to be Bin Laden translated into Americanese. ‘Ernst Hechinger’ turns out to have been the name Martin went under when he was involved in the German ...”

“... Tynan) to write a musical on nuclear war; the Spectator appointed him film critic, and his friend David Astor got him permanent residence and made him a regular reporter on the Observer. Lessing and Sigal inspired and tormented each other in equal measure. ‘She blames me for forcing her into other men’s arms. (“You made me do it. I’m really a one-man ...”