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“... and Brackett? There is also a Leigh Brackett, no relation, who worked on The Big Sleep, several Howard Hawks films (Rio Bravo, Rio Lobo, Hatari) and The Empire strikes back. Hamilton has much fun with film historians’ confusion in this zone. Just who was it who put the alcoholic Dashiell Hammett on a plane in 1937, or perhaps 1938? Hamilton warms to the ...”

“... was parodying whom. There is nothing in Duluth that is half as good as Vidal’s 1973 essay on E. Howard Hunt, novelist of many pseudonyms and architect of the Watergate break-in. ‘The Shakespeare of the CIA,’ Vidal says, ‘had found, as it were, his Globe Theatre.’ The fictive and the real do entwine here, since Hunt’s daydreams became Nixon’s ...”

“... the whole social fabric. At the end of every corridor in institutions of higher education stands Howard Kirk the History Man. The whole project may seem implausible, generating the same excitement, and the same confected frisson of spectacle and let-down, as the films of Lindsay Anderson. But the issue is not closed, as the renewal of interest in Carpenter ...”

“... we may, like Walter F. Starbuck, betray a friend without knowing it. Alternatively, we may, like Howard Campbell in Mother Night, send enemy secrets to our country while appearing to betray it by broadcasting Nazi propaganda. But the strange persistence of the idea of treason in Vonnegut’s fiction requires a richer explanation than this. Some of ...”

“... The reviews and the hype hadn’t prepared me for Malcolm X at all. I expected it to be dull and worthy, a straight and long-winded retelling of a famous life. I found it lively, pretty dramatic, not all that much too long. It is a glossy parable of the sinner who came to virtue, found fame and power, was threatened and killed: the work, death and glorification of St Malcolm Martyr ...”

“... French films but also the work of directors favoured by French critics of a certain persuasion. Howard Hawks, for instance, who ‘does not distort the real: he chooses from it the gestures, the moments and places that will be most revelatory’; and John Ford, for whom ‘creation is only that unique and decisive gesture – giving things a ...”

“... instead, taking a series of temporary jobs that included performing as a chorus girl at the Old Howard, a Boston burlesque theatre. She often came up with a Firbankian explanation for these casual employments: her spell at the Old Howard, for instance, was prompted by an unpaid bill for two Dior dresses.The ...”

“... is beautiful’ before its time. Another, more pragmatic coterie, presided over by Ebenezer Howard and his Garden City Association, realised some of the most substantial and enduring Utopian designs in the planned communities of Letchworth, Hampstead Garden Suburb and Welwyn Garden City. A third approach, in conscious and deliberate opposition to this ...”

“... free improvisation and led a Scratch Orchestra of musicians and artists; that his father was Michael Cardew, the potter; that he wrote a polemical tract alleging that Stockhausen ‘serves imperialism’; and that, after spending a decade as a prominent Maoist, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver, in an apparent accident that conspiracy theorists have ...”

“... At the Party Conference following Labour’s crippling defeat in the 1983 election Michael Foot stood before the massed ranks of the faithful to account for his stewardship of the Party. ‘I am deeply ashamed,’ he began. Unfortunately for Mervyn Jones, who both loves and admires his subject and would have us dwell on other things, it is the freeze-frame of that moment which lives on ...”

“... ten biggest box-office stars. The breakthrough years were 1948 to 1950, when he starred in Howard Howks’s cattle-drive film, Red River, and in John Ford’s cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande. As Roberts and Olson point out, the trilogy shifted the Western conventions of a film like Stagecoach (1939) in an imperial ...”

“... gentle Wilfrid Israel’, shot down over the Bay of Biscay (together with the actor Leslie Howard) while on a ‘mission of Jewish rescue’. That plaintive and fleeting reference swells to majestic grandeur in Wilfrid Israel: German Jewry’s Secret Ambassador. Naomi Shepherd’s biography labours under a severe handicap: while her subject is ...”

“... Though it does not say so, Michael Powell’s 700-page autobiography is merely the first volume of a work which Powell rather surprisingly tells us is ‘what my mother would have wished and what I was born for’. Surprising not for the reference to his mother, since he always speaks of her with the greatest affection and respect, but for the seeming dedication to letters in a man who never ceases to proclaim his lifelong devotion to images ...”

“... sit upon each other gracelessly, heavy with dull and often clumsily conveyed management detail. Michael Swann is a ‘man with a highly distinguished scientific background, a very sharp brain and clouds of pipe smoke’. Douglas Muggeridge goes off with Milne to the West Indies two pages after he has died ‘tragically’ of a brain tumour. Strange that a ...”

“... and decamp to garden cities and anaemic suburbs, egged on by the unworldly likes of Ebenezer Howard. Now London, a metropolis so intent on acquiring and exploiting empire that it can’t face its own problems squarely, becomes the villain of the piece. Well before the First World War, on Hunt’s analysis, the British city is in free fall. Its subsequent ...”