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“... Slim called Howard. There was a coy home movie playing out within the melodrama on screen, with Walter Brennan, Marcel Dalio and Hoagy Carmichael all there like pages to the marriage. Nothing could match that bliss, certainly not life. Bogart and Bacall were married shortly before The Big Sleep appeared, an automatic cashing in by Warners and ...”

“... book of all time. Prebble, born in England and raised in Canada, did for the clearances what Walter Lord did for the Titanic in A Night to Remember, and in the same way. Through vivid narrative history, told like a novel, he revived public interest in a historic disaster: the story of how, to quote from its opening sentence, ‘the Highlanders were ...”

“... great names trip off the tongue: Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Sylviane Agacinski, Jim West, Mary McCarthy, Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan – were no more than ...”

“... black businesses were owned by West Indians. In 1952, however, when Congress passed the McCarran Walter Act restricting migration, prospective migrants to the US were obliged to reconsider. The United Kingdom, where some of their kin had already settled, was an obvious choice. Officially, 492 West Indians, the majority of them Jamaican men with an average ...”

“... a film dedicated to the good of mutual understanding, Davies played with avuncular benignity by Walter Huston, and the film introduced by Davies himself. The movies actually written by Communists in the late 1930s (the harvest years of the Hollywood CP, after the ‘fair seed-time’ of the Popular Front) are almost all unwatchable. Murray Kempton in Part ...”

“... usually is. And now here comes Joan Didion, a little bit like the doomsayer on the wagon train (Walter Brennan, with teeth), but too arresting to be ignored, to tell us the prospectus, like the prospect, was a hoax. None of Joan Didion’s books has been long, exactly, not with the generous amounts of white space she provides, which serve as fresh linen and ...”

“... or cowed into an embittered quietism. It’s a shame that Perry’s book went to press before Gregory Doran’s revelatory RSC revival, performed at the Swan in Stratford last year, demonstrated what a shocking and resonant piece of drama Sejanus can still be. Perry acknowledges in passing that leaders of Western democracies still grant and receive ...”

“... Hello, Dolly! was a box-office flop and On a Clear Day a failure with the critics. Streisand hated Walter Matthau, her co-star in Hello, Dolly!, and was disappointed by the director, Gene Kelly, who had no interest in her many ideas. She went around him and asked the producer to shoot her first-act closing song the way she wanted. ‘Gene admitted that my way ...”

“... the old Ascendancy in Ireland. Elsewhere Yeats borrows a phrase from the poem to talk about Lady Gregory, who is said to be ‘indifferent to praise or blame’, a quality attributed to the law that was one of the pretty toys ‘we’ had when young. But then their youth in this sense goes back a while, at least to the 18th century, as Foster suggests, and ...”

“... made him hard to place, and his social ambiguity became for his critics (some themselves what Gregory Dart in Metropolitan Art and Literature 1810-40: Cockney Adventures called ‘social amphibians’) a matter of derision. His parents managed a thriving London hostelry and inn, the Swan and Hoop, near Bedlam Hospital in Moorfields. In his 1963 biography ...”

“... down the generations. ‘You keep seeing the same faces,’ Judge Robert Finn told John Gregory Dunne, who wrote about the case in 1997. ‘I’m into third-generation domestic abuse and restraining orders.’ He was talking about husbands and lovers whose fathers and grandfathers had appeared before him on the same charges in the course of his 16 ...”