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“... balanced judgments and informed good sense. There is hardly a harsh word about anyone – not even George Brown, who sometimes committed the ultimate sin (though Roll does not mention this) of bawling him out in front of his juniors. What the book lacks is a bit of seasoning, a sense of blood on the floor. One misses the rumbustious ebullience, the fire in the ...”

“... effect.’ Many of them have slit eyes because round eyes ‘would give the coy surprise of George Robey’. The cross-cultural juggling here is pretty amazing: ancient Eastern artists are said to be avoiding an effect a 20th-century English comedian made famous. ‘I always expected surprise’ was Robey’s verbal version of what his face said. But ...”

“... cohort of liberationists among the period’s other radicals: William Thompson, Francis Place, George Petrie, Thomas Spence, Robert Owen and Richard Carlile. In his day, Carlile was no less celebrated as a political agitator, and as a polemical atheist, than he was as a sexual reformer: some such mix of activities was the rule for this group. But it was ...”

“... went their separate ways: ways which so exasperated the political leadership that in 1917 Lloyd George intervened to change them, compelling the Navy to introduce convoys before the country starved, and the Army to suspend its offensives in Flanders before it bled to death. All that remained of Balfour’s grandiose Committee of Imperial Defence was its ...”

“... book, Frauds (1957), he dealt mercilessly with such miscellaneous charlatans as Lambert Simnel, George Psalmanazar, the 18th-century literary impostor, and Maundy Gregory, the honours-salesman and broker for the Zinoviev Letter. In the chapter on Gregory, he suggested that Gregory’s homosexuality explained his cult of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom ‘with ...”

“... 1935 collage. There’s Al Freuh’s jaunty economical outline of, unmistakably, the showman George M. Cohan spinning his cane, Paolo Garretto’s Babe Ruth as home run baseball floating in the air, unmistakably baseball and unmistakably Ruth. And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and ...”

“... now sided with a rebel group of Tories, which included Mosley, all united in a loathing for Lloyd George. Suddenly he became almost totally blind. Advised that it would help to have all his teeth out, he did so and contracted a fatal infection. He was 43. Meanwhile Lawrence (seen by Herbert as ‘an odd gnome, half-cad with a touch of genius’) had been ...”

“... crossed Newfoundland, 33 hours before he landed in Paris. The French President decorated him; King George V received him at Buckingham Palace; President Coolidge sent a cruiser and an admiral to bring him home. In Chesapeake Bay, Mr Kennedy tells us, the cruiser was met by four destroyers, two army dirigibles and a fly-past from all three services. Ashore in ...”

“... of storytelling in this novel has to do with the death of a dog. Three characters are involved: Michael Luxton, a taciturn dairy farmer; Jack, his elder son, aged 26; and Tom, his much younger son, approaching his 18th birthday. The old sick dog, named Luke, was originally just a farm dog, then for many years Jack’s close companion, but now more recently ...”

“... at the newspaper published in the office we have just visited. The headline says ‘Local boy, George Mills, just 17, hero at Dunkirk’. On the French beach the pilot, who has done valiant work against German aircraft and chosen not to leave himself enough fuel to go home, sets fire to his plane. The following shots include the men in the train, a glimpse ...”

“... Tony Blair said on 14 July. ‘As a sovereign nation, Israel has every right to defend itself,’ George W. Bush said on 16 July. By the time these statements were made, the IDF had bombed Beirut’s international airport, destroyed roads, bridges, power stations and petrol stations, and imposed an air and sea blockade. The Israeli army chief of ...”

“... than just grieving for the one. And humour does catch up with the pathos. When Jean Dujardin as George Valentin, past-it action hero of the old movies, incinerates his house and almost kills himself by setting fire to the reels of all his old films, the intelligent dog who was his co-star goes and fetches a cop. The cop, very slow to realise that the dog is ...”

“... answer, and the movie ends there. The paranoid theory about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, after George W. Bush’s much mocked neo-western claim that he was going to get him dead or alive (‘There’s an old poster out West I recall,’ Bush said), was that it could not, in our age of advanced technology and sophisticated bribery, be impossible to find the ...”

“... that good. All four films – William Wellman’s in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, George Cukor’s in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, Frank Pierson’s in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and Cooper’s now with himself and Lady Gaga, alias Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – are remarkably faithful to their ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”