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“... In​ the early 1920s, Herman J. Mankiewicz (‘Mank’) and Ben Hecht were not very successful writers in New York. Then Mank ventured west, the first of what was to become an exodus of literary talent to the Hollywood movie studios. In 1925, Mank summoned Hecht to join him with an offer of $300 a week to write for Paramount Pictures: ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots ...”

“... prepared the way for Citizen Kane. (It is true, apparently, that Mankiewicz sent a telegram to Ben Hecht saying: ‘Come at once. There are millions to be made and your only competition is idiots.’) Kael said that this style, found everywhere in screwball comedy but also in many other films of the 1930s, ‘felt liberating’, furthered a ...”

“... by Miklós László. But it was written by Samson Raphaelson, with the uncredited help of Ben Hecht, and everything about the film, its detailed, old-fashioned sets, its implausible streets, the odd mixture of accents among its characters and the fact that everyone speaks in epigrams, suggests fast-talking Hollywood. Raphaelson also wrote ...”

“... will go for me on the Jewish thing. I have a lot of references to Jews, ‘the smart Jews like Ben Hecht ... It ... does not make one love the Jews any better ... Asch hit him out of kike gratitude ... I’m all for keeping out of the manuals of the Semites as long as possible’: that kind of noise. But this was conventional then, Pos, you ...”

“... in Germany and even pandered to the Nazi regime. Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler and Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration cover much the same ground while emphasising different aspects of the Hollywood-Hitler connection. Doherty sees the moguls who founded and ran most of the large movie studios as only one part of Hollywood and is sensitive to the ...”

“... during which he informed her that his plans included three pictures for Alexander Korda and a Ben Hecht story about a girl and a magician, as well as adaptations of Macbeth and The Glass Menagerie, not to mention a version of Moby-Dick for the London stage. Louis Dolivet, a leftwing activist who arrived in America during the war as the embodiment of ...”

“... beautiful democratic Israel’ was revered by liberals, the New Statesman hero-worshipped Ben-Gurion as a model social democrat and the left barely knew that the Palestinians existed. That sentiment persisted until the 1967 war. Even two years after it, when the young Max Hastings visited Israel, he, like so many, was ‘thrilled by the brilliance of ...”

“... the counter of Schwab’s drugstore, Joan Didion’s desert air is wafting in under the door, and Ben Hecht is taking notes. Stein has an ear for Americana at its most bewildering, most politically servile, and she listens carefully, knowing that characters can fill out a culture. West of Eden is an oral biography of a few addresses, and the history ...”

“... I am apart but busy on my own project.’ ‘Old songs are more than tunes,’ the playwright Ben Hecht said. ‘They are little houses in which our hearts once lived.’ In the unmoored late 1960s, the great songs and the singers who were their messengers became the unofficial legislators of the times. ‘We were channeling some kind of reality that ...”

“... starts off with studio biographies written by publicists, and a kind of memoir by the screenwriter Ben Hecht (later published as My Story by Marilyn Monroe, featuring the well-spun tale of Norma Jeane’s abused childhood, and the white piano she saved from her mother’s house – a piano that sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at the ...”

“... Hope? Was it Mary Hay the actress? Mary Blair who married Wilson? Mary Armstrong who married Ben Hecht, who wrote a book about the screenwriter Charlie MacArthur, who almost made a mother of Dorothy Parker, who wrote a poem about Fitzgerald and fell a little in love with him? From this chaos of possible connections there gradually emerges an ...”

“... in 1974 and unambiguously announced in 1988. Yet despite these and other blunders Friedland and Hecht are usually fair, and their book, based on many interviews conducted over a period of years, contains much fascinating material. They are especially good on the fast increasing number of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor ...”

“... exposé of the curse of celebrity, and one of the many books that Monroe owned. According to Ben Hecht, Monroe said that Steffens’s autobiography excited her ‘more than any other book I had read’. She was excited by it at the exact moment when the world, for very different reasons, was about to be excited by her, when she was on the verge of ...”

“... Hitler’s enabler – the final straw.The crucial word is ‘fundamental’. Rose – currently Hecht Professor at Haifa University – is a fundamentalist, a Khomeini of the arts, who might, like the frequently, and justly, criticised Iranian mullahs, ask for books to be banned or burnt as an instrument of state authority. Rose can scarcely bear to allow ...”

“... should his ‘verse prove attractive to posterity’. Posterity has not proved kind, something Ben Mazer’s edition of Schwartz’s Collected Poems sets out to redress. But this sprawling volume is no corrective to the conclusion that Schwartz was a busted flush. John Ashbery (a great admirer of the early poems) was right: ‘The bulk of his work is ...”