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“... to think of a title for the ultimate unsellably boring book, he came up with Mr Bailey, Grocer. So Anna Sam’s Checkout fills a gap in what was never imagined as any kind of market. It really is an account of what it is like to work in the contemporary equivalent of the grocer’s, and it was a bestseller in France last year. ...”

“... of an African state, generally known as His Excellency, though his old schoolmates remember him as Sam. Another is Ikem Osidi, editor of the National Gazette, a fiery journalist and admired poet. At school, Ikem was considered ‘the brightest’, but Sam was the cricket captain and the ‘social paragon’. ...”

“... also contrives on his second day in the BL to catch the attention of a beautiful red-haired girl, Anna, at the next table in the North Reading Room. Stopping only for a gulped pint at the Museum Tavern, he’s promptly at her flat in Bedford Square rolling with her on the kitchen floor, admiring his own seductive moves like a sexier Jim Dixon. For anyone who ...”

“... and the rest of the book satirises types that can only be contemporary. In the first chapter Sam, a visiting US businessman, meets up with two Russian associates to discuss some unspecified but murky deal. The three tumble off a first-floor balcony, only to reappear in the distance as three mosquitoes flying towards the nearest village. This is only the ...”

“... deal of it in Dead Calm (1989), the eerie Australian thriller where she plays the ingénue wife of Sam Neill on a yachting trip gone horribly wrong (‘When Hughie sweeps off her sailing shorts, the exposure of Rae’s bottom is arousing,’ Thomson notes.) There it is again, pink and bare, in Billy Bathgate, where she is the moll of Dustin Hoffman’s ...”

“... that satirised Hitler and Stalin. They fought about nationalism and about her former lover, Sam Vanni, who was Jewish. In 1942, aged 27, she moved out to a studio. ‘I knew I’d never become a happy person, or a good painter, if I stayed.’ She bought a lynx stole and painted a self-portrait with it slung over her shoulders: she looks ...”

“... to watch the movie over and over again – a guilty pleasure – thanks to the performance not of Sam Shepard as the general in command but of Tom Sizemore as ‘the sergeant hacking his way out of the labyrinth’. Sizemore is in fact playing a lieutenant colonel, but he might as well be a sergeant (as indeed he was in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private ...”

“... same time. Samuel Fuller’s extraordinary Crimson Kimono also came out in 1959 and, sure enough, Sam Fuller shows up in Godard’s films six years later, in Pierrot le Fou, where le grand Sam appears as a party guest to define film as ‘like a battleground. Yes ... Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word ...”

“... I knew from Kansas City.’Garbo made the transition to sound with ease, introducing herself in Anna Christie (1930) with a throaty laugh. When her initial contract with MGM came to an end in 1932, she drove a very hard bargain. She got the money she wanted ($250,000 per film), as well as power of veto over the choice of director and co-star. Garbo had ...”

“... cheerful. So I felt I couldn’t refuse to write about her when they asked me.’ ‘Have you met Anna Bhai?’ I asked. (Anna Bhai is the name Mrs Besant gave herself.) ‘Whom?’ ‘Mrs Besant.’ He shuddered: ‘No, and I never want to.’ ‘She’s never done any good, I think?’ ‘No, not a bit.’ From time to ...”

“... as they were called in a phrase that would have appealed to Sir Harry Flashman. Hersch Gottlieb, Sam Lubelski, ‘Napoleon’ Dickenfaden and other notorieties negotiated for them with agents and principals (that is, parents) at the equivalent of trade fairs in Poland and Austrian Galicia. One well-known exchange point, where Israel Meyrowitz was arrested ...”

“... which may just prove to be the conspiracy sub-genre’s reductio ad absurdum: Bobby Kennedy and Sam Giancana and Marilyn’s psychotherapist tripping over each other in an effort to commit the great pointless homicide.* Monroe Books by Big Writers is another category: Norman Mailer (‘Marilyn was every man’s love affair with America’) to Gloria Steinem ...”

“... scandal assumed political significance. In February the Senate established a committee, chaired by Sam Ervin, a Democrat from North Carolina, to investigate Watergate and other campaign abuses. The judge in the trial of the Watergate burglars, ‘Maximum John’ Sirica, also aired his suspicions that the whole story had still not been told. Faced with the ...”

“... businesses is so vast that it is hard to hold them in the mind simultaneously. When his wife Anna filed for divorce and was asked the extent of her husband’s assets, she said she didn’t know what his assets were. In his response, Murdoch was asked the same question, and gave the same answer. The strange thing is that he may have been telling the ...”

“... to a lyric, extends it, burnishes it before finally giving it away. She was the coloratura soprano Anna Moffo’s favourite singer. ‘Ten Cents a Dance’, a working girl’s anthem, is from Love Me or Leave Me (1955), a biopic about the jazz singer Ruth Etting which in uncanny ways also tells Doris’s own story, down to the manager-turned-husband called ...”