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“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the bosom. How would she not make anyone nervous? Peter Bradshaw has written that Taylor and Clift ‘are almost like reflections of each other; when they kiss, something incestuous and thrillingly forbidden throbs out of the screen.’ Charlie Chaplin told Stevens it was ‘the greatest film ever made about ...”

“... and radio biographies but also in a few books, such as the biographies of Norman Mailer by Peter Manso (1985) and Truman Capote by George Plimpton (1997). Plimpton had previously been involved in what may have been the earliest significant biography of this kind, Edie: An American Biography ‘by Jean Stein edited with George Plimpton’, published in ...”

“... called Manly triumphs, The plumage of love. The mock serenade reverses the usual direction of a singer’s praise: Guglielmo and Ferrando vaunt their own charms, not the beauty of their love objects. And beneath the froth and wit, the scene stages a double demand: the young women are being asked to look at the Orientals without being prejudiced against them ...”

“... bachelors, and that’s still the template. Dorothy L. Sayers hardly seemed to believe in Peter Wimsey’s passion for Harriet Vane, and no one else is likely to. In his book Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, Graham Robb made a strong case that the granddaddy of them all, Poe’s Dupin, is coded as homosexual. Offering a dry précis of ...”

“... RKO contract player who had just been nominated for an Oscar for Crossfire, played a young singer (though she didn’t sing herself). By 1 June, when Ray and Grahame married in Las Vegas, she was four months pregnant with their son Tim. When Bogart bought the rights to Hughes’s novel, he imagined Lauren Bacall for the role of Laurel Gray. The couple ...”

“... of France’s fortifications along its eastern border with Germany. Donald and his brother, Peter, are not yet proficient enough in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual ...”

“... coincided with the eruption of identity politics among an affluent minority in the US. As Peter Novick clarifies in startling detail in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), the Shoah ‘didn’t loom that large’ in the life of America’s Jews until the late 1960s. Only a few books and films touched on the subject. The film Judgment at Nuremberg ...”

“... too, in some cases worker-historians, like the printer John Gorman, or the Communist singer Ewan MacColl, pioneered the discovery of industrial folk song – a continuing component in British Pop as well as an important source for the study of mores – and the study of popular imagery. Above all, there has been the growth of oral history, a ...”

“... with disgust ‘smirking and speaking rather loud’ at London parties, ‘where no one fits the singer to his song’, or ‘On the Asylum Road’, where she is one of the crowd passing the darkened windows which cut off the inmates, or ‘Saturday Market’, where a wretched woman tries to hide her disgrace under her shawl and sets the market ‘grinning ...”

“... press, but the press talked about her, and after her scandalous romance with the divorced Captain Peter Townsend they talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as the id of the Windsors, beside her twinkling mother and impeccably dutiful sister. Margaret moved with the ‘fast’ set, drank, smoked and sometimes looked bored at official events. By ...”

“... he’s given to such formulations as ‘my capital literary agent’ and ‘the amiable singer Cliff Richard’. Repetitive, prolix, not always persuasive in his reasoning and given to occasional dark murmurs about conspiracies, Tolstoy sometimes seems like a character out of Pale Fire. But his biography wrestles honestly with his stepfather’s ...”

“... Simon and Garfunkel, Otis Redding and Janis Joplin, who he said reminded him of an old-school jazz singer like Bessie Smith, but was saddened by Hendrix and The Who, with their sacrilegious destruction of instruments. ‘I am immediately repulsed by anything ugly that sends out bad vibrations,’ he wrote in 1968.In the context of 1960s hippie ...”

“... of struggling would-be stardom in Beckenham. He’d been in half a dozen bands as a saxophonist, a singer and a mime artist; he’d styled himself as a Mod, a hippy and a Buddhist; he’d called himself Davie Jones, David Jay and David Bowie (after Richard Widmark’s portrayal of Jim Bowie in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the ...”

“... postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within it. It was her natural mode to épater les bourgeois, starting with her ...”