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“... Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind ...”

“... itself, or on its musical realisation, or even on the performers, but on what Ruth Berghaus or David Alden or Andrei Serban is saying about it. Or rather what images they are inflicting upon it – for the production of opera is primarily a matter of what something is made to look like. Singers rarely have any authentic acting ability and the wiser ...”

“... Police – Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were but two of the kind of thing he was after. David Low portrayed him as a funeral mute with thick crêpe on his hat. Even that little classic The Specialist was a cause of some anxiety at Putnam, and a sigh of relief went up when the Times Literary Supplement dubbed it ‘innocently Rabelaisian’. We may ...”

“... buses, working on building sites or sitting in their own kitchens or living-rooms. Many, like David McQuillan, Winston McCaughey, Ritchie Latimer, Albert Beacom, Robert Bennett, Thomas Loughran and James McFall were with their children when they were attacked. William Gordon’s 10-year-old-daughter, Lesley, and seven-year-old son, Richard, were beside ...”

“... miscellaneous essays by MacCarthy, all of which have been collected before, and a memoir by Lord David Cecil, of which a portion appeared as preface to an earlier selection. Desmond MacCarthy was probably the best-known London literary journalist of his time, and it is clearly the view of publisher and editor that his influence can be extended into our ...”

“... interspersed with routine denials that anything was amiss, had it not been for one man. This was Victor Conte, the founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (or Balco for short), who masterminded the supply of steroids to some of the top performers in baseball and athletics for over a decade, and whose inability to keep his mouth shut has brought ...”

“... David Thomson​ is best known for a series of surveys of the history of cinema as Olympian in scope as they are in evenness of tone, the most notable being his indispensable Biographical Dictionary of Film from 1975, subsequently updated in a series of editions as the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His latest book, The Fatal Alliance, is every bit as commanding in its succinct description and analysis of a wide variety of films, good, bad and (mostly) indifferent ...”

“... He is interested in the human story, in the wounded sensibilities of occupier and occupied, of victor and vanquished. He finds a country devastated by Allied saturation bombing, its cities razed to the ground, most of its urban population homeless, hungry and cold. Millions of civilians, many of them women and children, wander aimlessly across the ...”

“... tried to seem like Baudelaire or Nietzsche in his splenetic grandeur the more he came to resemble Victor Meldrew. When he was sacked for drunkenness by the editor of the Carlisle Journal in 1947, he responded that ‘a man of my national and international reputation cannot be dismissed as you dismissed me yesterday without repercussions,’ claiming that he ...”

“... bible, my staff, my entertainer, my help in work and my recreation in leisure,’ she wrote to Victor and Ruth Gollancz in a rare display of feeling, after they had replaced the copy destroyed with the rest of Macaulay’s flat during the Blitz. Macaulay was the author of 41 books, and an early ‘media intellectual’ whose university education and ...”

“... now I have taken the view that my ‘Desert Island’ book, if I were asked, would have to be David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. First published in 1970, it has just re-appeared as A Biographical Dictionary of Film in a third edition that is revised and considerably enlarged. Despite its titles it is indeed a work of ...”

“... talking about fighting duels. The subject has recently attracted some fine historians. In 1988, Victor Kiernan published The Duel in European History, a thoughtful account that drew mainly on British and French evidence from the Early Modern period and presented the modern duel as an aristocratic residue. Five years later, Friedhelm Guttandin offered a ...”

“... at the Hyde Park Regis with three (fictional) storytellers from earlier segments: Sergei Rozanov, Victor Surkov and Masha Barash. The conference they are attending is an appalling affair. Stuffed shirts like ‘Kington Aimes, the humorous novelist’ rub shoulders with monstrous feminists and Third World demagogues. Thomas’s quartet – true artists that ...”

“... Adjustment, no matter how comfortable it appears to be, is never freedom.’ David Reisman said that in The Lonely Crowd, a work of academic/pop sociology, published in the US in the late Forties; much read and remarked on at the time, and now forgotten. I looked it up the other day when I was due to say something at the South Bank Centre in connection with the Cities on the Move exhibition at the Hayward ...”

“... of the unbelievable cold. The French title of the second volume, Il neigeait, is taken from Victor Hugo’s great poem about Napoleon, ‘L’Expiation’, which has much the same place in French culture that ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ holds in British. But Rambaud, unlike Hugo, sketches a war – and a Napoleon – scoured of glory or ...”