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“... circuit, but he was less familiar with the recording studio. He was ‘terrible’, his producer John Hammond recalled: ‘Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike.’ But in another sense he knew just what he was doing. The album was made in just six hours of studio time – two three-hour sessions – at a cost of around ...”

“... was loving, but I have never felt the family of God to be especially loving. The church to which we belonged was part of the Church of England, but during the Seventies it had been ‘renewed’ and now considered itself ‘charismatic’. These code words seem dated now; at the time they meant that the church felt itself to have been visited by the Holy ...”

“... a similar period; Les Enfants du Paradis, for instance, the first French film I ever saw and which we were taken from school to see at the Tower in Upper Briggate in Leeds. Then when I was on the Russian course during National Service at Cambridge we used to see French films at the Arts cinema – Une partie de campagne, Le ...”

“... tone that he would satirise more than forty years later in The Ambassadors: ‘I think that if we are to live in America it is about time we boys should take up our abode there; the more I see of this estrangement of American youngsters from the land of their birth, the less I believe in it. It should also be the land of ...”

“... the Tommy Dorsey band, had a slick new press agent called Milton Rubin, and the beginnings of what we would now call a posse. It was a personal turning point for the young man Jimmy Durante dubbed ‘Moonlight Sinatra’, at a moment when bigger changes were in the air. This was an era when audiences bugged out to live music, rather than losing themselves in ...”

“... have, I imagine, met those specifications. But the one who comes first to an American’s mind is John Dewey: a man whose engagement in primary and higher education, and whose active participation in politics, were considerably more extensive than Russell’s – and, I should argue, more focused, intelligent and useful. Dewey was the most prominent ...”

“... which led some to gravitate toward the fringes of American society both left and right. John Rambo, for his part, did both. In First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s character is a ‘half-German, half-Indian’ veteran, traumatised by the war, who arrives in a small town to pay his respects to a black comrade killed by exposure to Agent ...”

“... according to his younger brother, Quentin,there was a meal at Charleston eaten by Vanessa, we three children and, I think, Duncan. Vanessa served a pudding; she gave half to Julian, the rest of us divided what remained. Vanessa herself realised that there was something more than a little absurd about this method of displaying affection and said ...”

“... United States, mixing fictional with historical characters (‘What the real people say and do,’ we are told in an afterword to The Golden Age, ‘is essentially what they have been recorded as saying and doing, while the invented characters are then able to speculate on motivation’). To depict the domestic politics, foreign policy, social ...”

“... scenes, but the work still had to be done of identifying the truly great plays. By the same token, we can all have very clear ideas of what are the great scenes in cinema – and they’re innumerable, of course – and what are the great moments – the equivalents of the great lines – usually moments of kissing or killing or recognition. But ...”

“... When interviewed by the Observer Colonel Morgan placed the calumny in its true context: ‘We really have to put the record straight,’ he concluded after a precise rebuttal. ‘Especially as this man clearly has considerable influence.’ ‘This man’ is another name for a congenital liar. He says so himself – in so many words. Perhaps Colonel ...”

“... a story about Earl Haig at Durham Cathedral. The Field Marshal was being shown round by the dean when they paused at the tomb of the Venerable Bede. Haig regarded it thoughtfully for a moment, then said: ‘Of course. Bede. Now he was a woman, wasn’t he?’ It’s a good example of scrambled memory, but the laborious explanations that I had to go into ...”

“... from Shils’s amusingly unself-conscious, Cold War-imperial foundational essay: The categories we employ are the same as the ones we employ in our studies of our own societies, and they postulate the fundamental affinities of all human beings. Their persistent application in research and the diffusion of the results of ...”

“... in Hannibal, he was twice arrested for stealing food, he died of cholera about 1889. So far as we know, Blankenship never escaped down the Mississippi with a runaway slave but we know he was the kind of boy who would have sprung to do it. Did he not acknowledge, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that Jim ‘had an ...”

“... have been dug, linking the Great Western line at Paddington to the Great Eastern at Whitechapel. We’ll have spent £15 billion, we’ll have seven new London train stations, and we’ll finally be able to travel from Essex or Greenwich to Berkshire or Heathrow, via Central ...”