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“... the final years of public fame, culminating in Frost’s reading of ‘The Gift Outright’ at the Kennedy Inauguration and his meeting with Khrushchev in Russia. The problem for any contemporary biographer is that Lawrance Thompson is the only source for much of Frost’s life; his biography (backed by the two thousand pages of his manuscript ‘Notes on ...”

“... her.It should be noted that the party was held two weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, such boozy antics somewhat dissonant in what was for most Americans a joyless holiday season. Yet what appears to have peeved Kazin was something closer to home: the crass spectacle of chums and colleagues gloating over their ascendant ...”

“... of whom came from socially prominent families, assisted her.’ Her antics were widely discussed. Richard Avedon remembered her organising a photograph of a model in ‘a stiff wedding dress’. Having shouted for pins, Vreeland took one, ‘and walked swinging her hips down the narrow office to the end. She stuck the pin not only into the dress but into the ...”

“... started out in different circles. After university he became a research assistant to Charles Kennedy, then an SDP MP. Marshall himself stood in Fulham on an SDP-Liberal ticket in 1987, but finished a distant third. He kept up an interest in politics, founding a City branch of Liberal Democrat supporters in the mid-1990s and paying for party ...”

“... campaign for the mayoralty, which the long-serving Tom Bradley is about to relinquish. Businessman Richard Riordan, one of 24 candidates to succeed him, seems to be promising that all the unpleasantness of South Central will somehow be removed. He puts it less plainly even than this, however: his paid-for advertising slots include a sound-bite in which a ...”

“... other ex-communists, also contributed to The God That Failed, a 1949 book edited by the Labour MP Richard Crossman. He went on to foster a series of CIA-funded seminars, populated by Encounter contributors, in the Austrian ski resort of Alpbach.Koestler’s adventurous past in the Spanish Civil War, along with his explorations of cosmology (The ...”

“... Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate ...”

“... wrote the piece and made a quality decision to do something else with their time. According to Richard Loncraine, who directed Blade on the Feather, Potter ‘got lazy and recycled the same ideas too many times. I think he looked down on his audience, he thought the world was full of arseholes and he patronised them.’ Still, Cook finds Potter’s ...”

“... about the role of rape in our culture. Both present America in a state of crisis. William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas are just the tip of the iceberg; the statistics are horrific. Rape is increasing four times faster than any other crime. Anywhere from 20 to 44 per cent of girls in their early teens can expect to suffer rape or ...”

“... for a single-crop economy of seven million people ninety miles from the Florida coast. After Kennedy, in April 1961, signed off on the coup Eisenhower had planned, and incompetently executed it, nothing was going to repair relations (in the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mailer proposed easing relations by sending Ernest Hemingway to Havana as a ...”

“... the city’s deadly riots in 1965 and 1992; the formative years spent in southern California by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the region’s postwar conservative movement, which greatly influenced their presidencies; and last year’s protests over policing and racism, which were among the largest in the US. The rest of the time, you might ...”

“... hadn’t got into the black. In What It Takes (1992), a breathless work of campaign stenography, Richard Ben Cramer described the confession Biden made to his aides before deciding to run: ‘The debts – he went through his finances whole, the mortgages, the credit cards. He was into Visa, Amex for thousands.’The letter to his tenants appears in ...”

“... Paris, intended for use in assassinating Castro, on the very day in November 1963 that President Kennedy was shot. The Cubans were understandably careful with unannounced visitors bearing gifts. At the end of my trip, I was able to present Carlos Rafael with the rather sweaty Stilton, before we went on to discuss Cuba’s ‘second’ agrarian reform – the ...”

“... that his thoughts strayed to ‘popsies’ even while working hard on the structure of DNA; Richard Feynman enjoyed having himself photographed playing the bongos, and, like Kary Mullis, broadcast his enthusiasm for topless bars: ‘When my calculations didn’t work out,’ Feynman said, ‘I would watch the girls.’ Mullis just rides the wave farther ...”

“... and very unreliable; Ian Mikardo: I don’t know much about him, but have sometimes wondered; Richard Crossman: ??Political climber. Zionist (appears sincere about this). Too dishonest to be outright FT. Nearly all of this, however, has been known about for years and made use of in biographies of Orwell. So, too, have the Notes on which he based his Home ...”