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“... of few words, invincible in gunplay, and a dispenser of Solomonic justice. As portrayed first by Tom Mix, then by Randolph Scott, the Lassiter type descends directly to Clint Eastwood. The last scene in Unforgiven (even down to the whipping) is the first scene of Riders of the Purple Sage. All that’s been added is a sadism which would have appalled ...”

“... that the Metropolitan Police had spied on the phone records of the political editor of the Sun, Tom Newton Dunn. Snowden might have taught us to expect to be monitored, but his message, that our freedom is being diluted by a manufactured fear of the evil that surveillance ‘protects’ us from, is not being heard. Louder and clearer to many is the message ...”

“... for emphasising French history and experience. It is a supplement to, not a replacement of, Leonard Levy’s authoritative Blasphemy, from which the author courteously distances himself. Levy is mostly concerned with the history of the offence in England and America, a history in which that judgment of Lord Chief Justice Hale in 1676, later disputed by ...”

“... book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for it, but all of them repeat the same litanies of complaint, distress and need that fill Vivienne and Tom’s letters to members of the Eliot family in the first years of the marriage, and ...”

“... Richard. Professionally, Richard is taken under the wing of a veteran hard-bitten journalist, Leonard Tanner, who (you’ve guessed it) betrays him, leaving him to be arrested and tortured by the Rhodesian Special Branch. The only characters in the novel who keep faith with Richard are the dusky peasant girl, Comrade Liberty (bandoliers fetchingly draped ...”

“... the fire he felt. Of all the smelts I ever smelt, I never smelt a smelt like that smelt smelt. Leonard (Chico), Adolph (Harpo), Julius (Groucho), Herbert (Zeppo) and Milton (Gummo): Groucho was a middle child, if you want to make anything of it. He was the first to succeed, at the age of 15, with a vestigial talent for singing, but a miasma of rotten luck ...”

“... In the 1980s, Carman took on a series of high-profile criminal cases. He successfully defended Dr Leonard Arthur, who had been charged with murder when he deliberately left a Down’s syndrome child to starve to death; Peter Adamson (Len Fairclough of Coronation Street), on trial for indecently assaulting children; and, most famously, the comedian Ken ...”

“... to the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall. They read Proust and Spengler, Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway Hall. And they formed an archaeological group to look for relics of Norman and ...”

“... of the song’: Under normal circumstances, someone – whether Jim Stewart, [recording engineer] Tom Dowd, or Otis himself – would have stopped the take so that Otis could get his bearings, refresh his memory, and re-record the track. But with time of the essence, Otis forges ahead, faking it as he goes, mangling the song’s parable of a man who’s ...”

“... to learn from the recent engaging memoir by Hughes’s brother, Gerald, that the young boy had a tom-tom hidden in the local woods on which he would happily bash away. Eliot was giving the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard when he made the comment about the savage and the drum, a context which must make some ...”

“... European ladies’ and similar barracuda. He doesn’t divulge any gossip or glean any Tom Wolfe-ish observations from these outings, too concerned with keeping tabs on his own progress to tilt the spotlight elsewhere. One of the best-known passages in Making It is its account of the status update running like a stock ticker through the minds of ...”

“... Rogin argues that American cinema was born of blackface: Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 super-production Gone with the Wind ‘provide the scaffolding for American film history’ – although it takes us no further than the eve of the Second ...”

“... treatment of more radical and deviant players, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham and Tom Paine, is noticeably sharper and less evocative, and this points to the main limitation of his analysis. Any survey of such a crowded period of history has to be selective: but here selectivity and boisterous epigrams result, on occasions, in reducing ...”

“... a-Bang’.) To make money, Elton began to work as a session musician, singing backing vocals for Tom Jones and playing piano with the Hollies. He also worked for a label called Marble Arch which knocked out versions of chart hits and sold the albums cheap in supermarkets. This, Elton points out, might sound sad, but it was in fact ‘screamingly, howlingly ...”

“... elections, sabotage, attacks on people seen as collaborators. In their History of South Africa Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat write that between 1986 and 1988 ‘more than a hundred explosions caused 31 deaths and 56 injuries in streets, restaurants, cinemas, shopping centres and sports complexes in the major cities.’ The army said the country was at ...”