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“... financial arrangement was part of the deal with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa ...”

“... through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin ...”

“... Under family pressure to marry – his mother, Cosima, was 78; his sister, Eva, married to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, remained childless – Siegfried proposed to Winifred. She accepted: ‘I entrust myself body and soul to you, guide me through life – shape me as you would have me!’ The young bride was admitted to the composer’s dysfunctional ...”

“... in 1951; five years later, Hancock’s Half Hour introduced two brilliant writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who between them created a character whose sense of social and intellectual confinement puts The Lavender Hill Mob’s bullion robbers in the shade and eventually – after Hancock had morphed into Harold Steptoe – blossomed into something like ...”

“... badge of screen greatness is a kind of unassuming, extremely artful minimalism (Cooper, Mitchum, Stewart etc), and that someone like Sellers can therefore be handed over to the hoi polloi with some passing acknowledgment that he ‘gave ... pleasure to the public’. Sporadically, Sellers did achieve his own kind of greatness. He never lost his radio ...”

“... you don’t really want it, but Spender protested too much. In 1994 he wrote a letter to the young Alan Hollinghurst after receiving a copy of his second novel, The Folding Star. The letter shows a man in a state of confusion or unhappiness about the choices he has made. Dear Mr Hollinghurst Thank you very much for asking your publisher to send me your ...”

“... The account of Liszt’s death in Bayreuth in 1886 is well told and moving, but adds little to Alan Walker’s account in his great three-volume biography, which made full use of the then unpublished diary of Liszt’s pupil and unofficial carer Lina Schmalhausen. Liszt had returned to Bayreuth at Cosima’s request for that year’s festival, but arrived ...”

“... stacks of books. This was Carolyn’s current reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid ...”

“... intellectuals, alien Jews and international pederasts who call themselves the Labour Party,’ Alan Bennett had Richard Hannay, Buchan’s most famous hero, muse in Forty Years On (1968). Another West End send-up of The Thirty-Nine Steps finished a nine-year run in September 2015, a century after the final instalment of Buchan’s best-known novel appeared ...”

“... was twitching on his scalp.’ Behind Kingsley Amis and ‘ice-cream suited’ J.G. Ballard are Alan Brien, Maeve Peake, Dave Britton and legions of the erased and discontinued: Notting Hill colons, grafters, bullshitters, pharmaceutical casualties and Fleet Street drain-rats. Moorcock grants us more than any novelist is required to deliver: hence the ...”

“... In Moscow, where I was living at the time (employed by the Guardian, as it happens, the paper Alan Rusbridger edited from 1995 to 2015), dawn comes early in summer and it was hot outside, though the city was asleep.* I switched on the computer I’d recently bought and connected to the internet. Once the screech of the dial-up had subsided and the browser ...”

“... also talked about Fisher’s ideas for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in ...”

“... each person might be thinking their own thoughts, before one of them, Claudette Colbert or Jimmy Stewart, steps out. And if they seem wildly capable of being themselves, that capability is crowned by the ease with which they move themselves around, sovereign in their cars. This can all be observed in America’s foundations, and the writer Cotten Seiler ...”

“... decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious ...”

“... own mixed feelings about film acting. Some movie stars – Ingrid Bergman, say, or James Stewart – are excellent in almost everything they do. Others have glory years interspersed with disappointments. And then there is Taylor. Although technically superb as a film actor, having been schooled since her childhood on the MGM lot, her performances ...”