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“... The photographs of Louise Brooks in Lulu in Hollywood show a face as beautiful, and almost as unchanging, as a Japanese mask. Both praise and criticism notice this inexpressiveness: ‘Louise Brooks exists with an overwhelming insistence ... always enigmatically impassive,’ ‘Louise Brooks cannot act ...”

“... I once showed G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film version of Wedekind’s Lulu plays, Louise Brooks’s starring vehicle Pandora’s Box, to a graduate class at the University of Iowa. I was apprehensive; these were children of the television age, unfamiliar with the codes of silent movies, especially of German silents, the exaggerated gesture, the mask-like make-up, the distorted shadows ...”

“... of the women they escort in tight black leather, bangs and tattoos, cute little toughies, so Louise Brooks annealed in MTV, headed off for huevos rancheros and the Sunday Times at some chic, crowded dive. I don’t recall it at all this way, do you? How sweetly complected and confident they look, their faces unclouded by the rages and ...”

“... and slavelike. There are actresses whose intelligence always shows – like Katharine Hepburn, Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box, or Dietrich in the Sternberg films. Then there are actresses who seem stripped of any chance of control. They are simply there, caught in the lights by the camera and the movie – like ...”

“... Tynan’s other four are stars of stage, screen or box – Ralph Richardson, Johnny Carson, Mel Brooks and Louise Brooks. Still, he makes a polished bid for literary respectability, and Penelope Gilliatt, introducing her own collection, has an even more exalted sense of what she is about: The mysteries of creativity ...”

“... revive his reputation through a series of profiles for the New Yorker, his biggest scoop enticing Louise Brooks to break her silence, a piece laden with Sunset Boulevard shadows. The much-publicised party snap of Tynan in drag as Brooks, looking instead eerily like a cross between Milton Berle and Anna Wintour. His ...”

“... lived in his own Superbia. ‘Keaton at home was no different from Keaton in films,’ his friend Louise Brooks wrote. He lived like a playful pasha. Money was no object and of no account. He took scant interest in business, in his celebrity, or latterly in his children. To please the regal whims of the actress Natalie Talmadge, whom he married in ...”

“... into the open. Edna St Vincent Millay had so many lovers that they considered holding reunions; Louise Brooks, in search of ‘the truth, the full sexual truth’, roundly announced that what she liked best was ‘to drink and fuck’, and it seems reasonable to say that the age of feminine reticence was over. Douglas cites Freud’s essay ‘Thoughts ...”

“... woman with (as Woolf noticed sniffily) ‘hard’ outlines, smart scent and a squared-off Louise Brooks fringe. There was no fun in writing about writing. Perhaps the most famous entry of all in these papers is the one where she records her first haemorrhage – and also her dread of not having enough time to assemble an oeuvre: February 19th ...”

“... The new biography of Audrey Hepburn, by Barry Paris, a writer already praised for his books on Louise Brooks and Garbo, is an acute, tender-hearted and entertaining dish of Hepburn facts – he interviewed friends and family, and has a sharp eye for her film-work’s idiosyncrasies; more important, he offers a grid for dream inquiries into star ...”

“... whom they converged. Gucci’s ‘Hard Deco’ line for Spring 2012 was launched in homage to ‘Louise Brooks and Nancy Cunard’. This edition of her poems chooses one of Moffat’s photographs for its cover: Cunard’s head is upside down, her chin pointing upwards and her headdress cascading down, the focus blurring and softening as it goes, until ...”

“... his signature moustache. The Temptress made a loss, but everyone now knew just how hot Garbo was. Louise Brooks said that MGM had at last found itself a heroine ‘with youth, beauty and personality enough to make free love sympathetic’.MGM decided to double down on Garbo by pairing her with its most bankable male star, John Gilbert, in the costume ...”

“... for more of Humphrey Bogart, just seen in The Petrified Forest. His last, a New Yorker profile of Louise Brooks, reads like a farewell hymn to Aphrodite Cinematica, ageless epitome of all the girls loved over the years on thousands of silver screens. It seems to have been by way of film that he was drawn to his next love, old Broadway. As fans devour the ...”

“... 39, he returned to West Point as superintendent. His mother moved back with him. Two years later, Louise Brooks, a lively, 31-year-old divorced mother of two and heiress to one of the biggest fortunes in America, drove up the Hudson to West Point with friends for the day. Brooks had already been the mistress of General ...”

“... punkish translations of Brecht, attended repertory screenings of Metropolis and M and put Louise Brooks posters on bedroom walls. Fassbinder’s real obsession was with the 1950s, and with West Germany’s US-bankrolled economic miracle. His films weren’t about the way a society becomes fascist, but about a recently fascist society’s use of ...”