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“... Annabel swiftly knocks out a replacement with the help of Thaddeus Griffin, an action movie star working at Means of Production in a futile bid for artistic respectability. For complicated reasons to do with a private joke about Rosa Elisabetta, they call their treatment ‘The Diviners’. After a courier delivery goes wrong, thanks in part to an ...”

“... dawn, ten days ago, with three Tibetan monks in maroon robes, I watched the rising of the Morning Star and came away no wiser than before. But later I wondered if the Tibetans were aware that the bodhi tree was murmuring with gusts of birds, while another large pipal, so close by that it touched the holy tree with many branches, was without life. Matthiessen ...”

“... perspective that you realise it’s set in the late 1970s only when a kid breaks out some Star Wars figures. Harriet’s family’s shabby treatment of a black maid, which looks as though it’ll be the story’s secret centre, turns out to be little more than a milestone in the heroine’s personal development. The Goldfinch is even less interested ...”

“... HPtFtU’ that Smith continues to pass muster as a hapless if lusty picaro, as well as the star of an indignant historical novel with one or two detonations still to come. I’m not sure what the book can reasonably be likened to – a mad mixture of Thomas Pynchon and Penelope Fitzgerald? – and I’m not sure that I’d recommend it over Red Plenty ...”

“... of an apartment in central Paris once occupied by Michèle Morgan (born Simone Renée Roussel), star of Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes, the acme of 1930s poetic realism. The evidence presented comes, with a single exception, from a roll-call of the most celebrated divas of 20th-century French cinema: Danielle Darrieux, Simone Signoret, Anouk ...”

“... of a pensionable age, Verwoerd’s assassination (‘A Nation Mourns’, 17 September 1966) is a star cover. Younger readers may prefer a ghoulish photo of Norman Tebbit, the Tories’ ‘New Caring Face’ in 1986, and his prince-of-darkness bubble: ‘I can’t speak to you now. The sun’s coming up.’ But if a long-lost favourite is not on view at the ...”

“... man’ in the fall of 1999. And like the doomed protagonist, George, in the novel A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, I too was gay; I too was an English professor (on a one-term sabbatical back then); I too was middle-aged (at 39 years old then, whereas George is 58); I too was living in Los Angeles (although my teaching position is in Iowa City); I too ...”

“... fact surely of some importance? He did so by publishing some Recollections of the Australian poet Christopher Brennan. In these we learn that Pennington was known to his Australian friends as ‘David’, was (like ‘David Peterley’) an associate of a certain George Billam in founding the Turret Repertory Theatre in Sydney, and (like ‘David ...”

“... giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake of ‘unity’, a pro-Chinese speaker (for some reason I remember that ...”

“... of his life were consumed by efforts to pay off his enormous debts.George Sand, already a literary star when the revolution broke out, worked closely with the ministers of the new government, and threw herself into the work of writing articles and brochures in their service. ‘The republics of the past,’ she wrote in March 1848, ‘were incomplete ...”

“... Possessed, her first book, is a carefully organised selection of the pieces that have made her a star among America’s ‘more junior producers of literary and memoiristic fluff journalism’, as she put it a couple of years ago on her blog, My Life and Thoughts. Apart from the opening and closing sections, each chapter was first published – one in a ...”

“... Christopher Butler’s survey of post-war literature, music and painting maintains a judicious critical distance from its subject. Readers who wish a more direct report from the front lines of the avant-garde should consult a new anthology, Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies, edited by Jean Dupuy ...”

“... completely professional during the past three decades, tennis deserves a place of honour in what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism. A sport of skilful, well-mannered ladies and gentlemen has metamorphosed into a brutal confrontation between unpleasant, physically overdeveloped and remorselessly single-minded hitters, which is controlled by ...”

“... of Amis’s public personality alongside an intelligent and generous appraisal of his novels.The star fiction-reviewers were brought out in force: Bernard Levin (Sunday Times), Auberon Waugh (Daily Mail), John Osborne in the very first ‘John Osborne Review’ in the New Standard, a launching to which Quentin Oates devoted some well-placed sarcasms in one ...”

“... Christopher Andersen’s book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross. But what do you expect? Madonna’s wedding was different from other people’s. The plans were made in secrecy, and backed by armed force. ‘Even the caterer ... was kept in the dark until the last minute.’ You also, you may protest, have been to weddings where the caterer has seemed to be taken by surprise ...”