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“... They became, successively, the most influential publishers in the world: Philip Graham, who inherited the Washington Post from his father-in-law, Eugene Meyer, and his shy, self-effacing wife, Katharine, who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960 ...”

“... Of these novels, the one with legs and a long finish, as the wine-tasters say, is Graham Swift’s Waterland, his third. The story – which is at once story and history, erzählung and geschichte – is sustained within, or threaded into, an intricate web of interlocking images. Or rather, to respect its prevailing metaphor, it floats and develops in an amniotic fluid of local, biological and antiquarian detail ...”

“... older. In the United States he was befriended and greatly assisted by Agnes B. Meyer, mother of Katharine Graham, wife of the owner of the Washington Post. Mann flattered Meyer in the many letters he wrote to her and had his revenge in his diaries. ‘That stupid and tyrannical old bag irritates me,’ he wrote, referring to her as ‘the decidedly ...”

“... wants to be Cary Grant,’ Grant said. ‘Even I want to be Cary Grant.’ This is the Cary Grant Graham McCann is interested in. He confronts his subject as if he were less a person than an effect – the self-referential hero, endlessly, classily ironic. McCann has not just written the story of how Archie Leach became Cary Grant, or an analysis of how much ...”

“... made over her sexy little body, her pouty mouth, her flirtatious ways. No less an authority than Graham Greene pointed out, after seeing Captain January, that she had an appeal ‘interestingly decadent’. All of this infuriates the grown-up Temple, and who can blame her? All she really did was tap her guts out in a series of well-made, unpretentious and ...”

“... allowed to visit the house. ‘It was no uncommon experience,’ Stevenson’s first biographer, Graham Balfour, wrote, ‘for a visitor who had come to Bournemouth specially to see him, to find himself put to the door, either on the ground of having a cold, to the contagion of which it was unsafe for Stevenson to be exposed, or because his host was already ...”

“... some of them opportunist, some earnest and candid about being incomplete. The biographies by Graham McCann and Geoffrey Wansell, both published in 1996, were steps in the right direction. There are memoirs, like Maureen Donaldson’s An Affair to Remember (1989); or Dear Cary: My Life with Cary Grant (2011) by Dyan Cannon, his fourth wife and the mother ...”

“... evidently strained every sinew. It apparently infects the 1947 film of Brighton Rock, based on Graham Greene’s novel of 1938. With the exception of Ida’s Pierrot troupe there is little in the film to suggest any link to Victorian England. But then the ‘structure of feeling’ is a woolly conceit, almost a faith. Proof isn’t required. A Brighton ...”

“... Unknown Weapon’, the most complex of the stories, she has to solve an especially knotty murder. Graham Petleigh, the destitute son of a miserly squire is found dead outside his father’s country house. What and where is the murder weapon? Why was a large black trunk delivered to the house on the day of the murder and where has it gone now? Why won’t the ...”

“... that overrides all other categorical imperatives. We see it in Racine, in Wuthering Heights, in Graham Greene, in Les Liaisons dangereuses, in Love in the Time of Cholera – love as a terminal illness. In contrast, we may consider the nous of Auden: ‘we meet romantically passionate engaged couples, but never a couple of whom we can say that their ...”

“... writing I Am Mary Dunne and wrote a screenplay for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, in which Katharine Hepburn was to play the lead. (It was never used; many years later the role was played by Maggie Smith.) Moore wrote to Friel: ‘I know this sounds un-Ulster and extreme, but as it is much easier for me to say it in print than to your face, I am first ...”

“... have guessed how Welles’s performance in the big scene would alter the dynamic of the film. Graham Greene wrote the hero and the hero’s friend as Englishmen; getting Welles for Harry Lime meant taking another American for his friend Holly; and the casting of Joseph Cotten as the loyal friend could not help pointing to Citizen Kane. This prepared ...”

“... Elsie de Wolfe and her Broadway-producer lover Bessie Marbury; the actresses Eva Le Gallienne, Katharine Cornell, Ona Munson, Teddie Gerard, Tallulah Bankhead and Hope Williams; the rakish lesbian salonnière Natalie Barney; Dolly Wilde (Oscar’s opium-addicted niece); Marie Laurencin, painter and friend of Picasso; the Ballets Russes dancer Tamara ...”