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“... the independent producer Walter Wanger to buy the rights to Howard Fast’s novel Citizen Tom Paine for him to direct and, as the FBI noted (they had a dossier on Welles), planned a series of educational short films on ‘minority problems’. The Stranger (1946) – a frankly commercial production which Welles made for another independent, Sam ...”

“... all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy’s fan letters complained of ‘red infiltration’; the rest fretted about ‘sex depravity’. The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with ...”

“... stoking public awareness. This all changed in 1988, the year Rain Man was released. In the film, Tom Cruise plays a callow grifter who kidnaps his autistic older brother – Dustin Hoffman in full Stanislavskian splendour – and takes him on a soul-enlarging road trip to Las Vegas. ‘In the year before the film came out,’ Silberman writes, ‘fewer than ...”

“... off, and partly because, while he enjoyed clever, boozy lunches with Rosenberg and his co-editor, Tom Hess, he disagreed with their editorial choices. Barthelme didn’t want to curate a ‘love-feast’ to the stars of modernism’s ‘achieved revolution’; he wanted to lead the one in progress. The second issue (Summer 1964) made some progress in that ...”

“... death blow but wonders rather whether ‘the feminisation of America’ is one reason we now have Tom Cruise in place of Bogart. A variety of voices are cited. Sharon Waxman in the New York Times attributes the loss of ‘man’s men’ to what she believes (against a good deal of evidence) to be the entirely peaceful and cosseted existence everyone in the US ...”

“... off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus detectable in the blood. You were ill, but you might not feel it ...”

“... Baldwin promised a ‘fire next time’. But the fire this time comes in cool, ironic novels like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Oliver Stone released his satirical movie Wall Street, the business press embraced the slick financial Mephistopheles at the heart of the indictment. ‘Greed is good,’ purrs the villain, Gordon Gekko. Greed might ...”

“... philosopher-doyenne Hannah Arendt’s New Year’s Eve party, attends a small dinner party at Mary McCarthy’s ‘meticulously furnished apartment’, and receives his ‘first summons’ to a posh Park Avenue salon stocked with ‘titled European ladies’ and similar barracuda. He doesn’t divulge any gossip or glean any ...”

“... votes. I have little doubt she’s up to the job, but am less clear on how she’ll do it.’ Tom Goldstein, the publisher of the SCOTUSblog, devoted to the goings-on at the Supreme Court, says: ‘I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past ...”

“... FDR won the election it seemed clear that Edgar Hoover was finished: the new Attorney-General, Tom Walsh, had loathed Hoover ever since the Palmer raids and was determined to sack him. But on the way to FDR’s inauguration, Walsh had a heart attack and died. The new Attorney-General, Homer Cummings, was a very different man: like Mencken, he realised that ...”

“... the RNC, means safe from illegal immigrants, and speaker after speaker spoke of an ‘invasion’. Tom Homan, a sort of minister for deportation, a man from New York who seems proud of his own coarseness, drew tremendous approval from the delegates, particularly the Southern ones, by speaking about ‘a record number of known and suspected terrorists sneaking ...”

“... He might have ruined it with its women: the Toni Ware chapter in particular sounds like Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback. (RIP.) He might have ruined it with his doubt, which caused him to turn somersaults like a cracked-out fairground child. (‘Is it showing off if you hate it?’ Hal Incandenza asks in Infinite Jest.) But it is there. The ...”

“... too is a struggle to break free of ‘typecasting’ – a refusal to accept the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of ...”

“... those celebrity ‘shag-tree’ diagrams found on the internet, the ones that purport to show that Tom Cruise and Pope Benedict, say, have both slept with X or Y. But Murphy and Garland weren’t exactly pillow-queens either. Just about the only person mostly missing from the intimate cavalcade of biddable and beddable is Radclyffe Hall, author of the ...”