“... Blake and others, and more unusual enthusiasms too, including the graphic ‘collage novels’ of Norman Rubington and the work of Sonia Delaunay. Delaunay wasn’t much in fashion at the time, but the abstracted expanding circles of her paintings perhaps inspired Boty’s attempts to depict her orgasms, which she described as ‘orange circular ...”

“... to produce a future citizen of Soviet America’.After twelve issues, two of the young editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, appalled by the Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937, wrested the magazine from party control. The new PR emerged in December 1937. F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy were also on the masthead, as was George ...”

“... can be divided into three distinct periods: the first period was from their settlement with the Norman Conquest untill their expulsion from England in 1290; the middle period ends with unofficial toleration under Cromwell in 1655, when England was nominally Judenrein, although many individual Jews did make their way there; the last period shows the Jews in ...”

“... a fucked-out burn-out who still has a seductive way with words. To borrow a word from Norman Mailer, Tynan was a sexologue – an ideologue about sex. He was an admirer of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, about whom he was writing a book-length study (never completed). With his once-voguish theories about armoured personalities and orgone ...”

“... Orwell would have disliked New Labour. Am reminded of an essay written by the sociologist Philip Abrams back in 1964 in which he complained about ‘the difficulties our political leaders evidently have in saying exactly what they mean when they speak of “modernising” British society’.5 November 1997. To hear Lord Nolan give the annual Dimbleby ...”

“... essay ‘The Intellectual and Jewish Fate’, published in the Jewish magazine Commentary in 1957, Norman Podhoretz, the patron saint of neoconservative Zionists in the 1980s, said nothing at all about the Holocaust.Jewish organisations that became notorious for policing opinion about Zionism at first discouraged the memorialisation of Europe’s Jewish ...”

“... the tiredest of tropes by damning the BBC’s coverage as the work of ‘traitors in our midst’. Norman Tebbit’s much quoted tirade against the corporation – the ‘insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties’ – betrayed a shaky grasp of ...”

“... of American Bases. Before I agreed (and in an effort to get out of going, I suspect) I consulted Norman Dombey who (as readers of the LRB know) is well versed in nuclear politics. Not that Menwith Hill – RAF Menwith Hill, as it is euphemistically called, though it’s almost wholly American – is (yet) a nuclear base, only a satellite warning and ...”

“... Cheney conceded, ‘but the most plentiful source of affordable energy in the country.’ Philip Clapp, president of the US National Environmental Trust, denounced Cheney’s plan as ‘an across-the-board attack on the environment’. Europeans began calling Bush the ‘Toxic Texan’. Scientists have all but unanimously condemned the new US ...”

“... not to this ethnic-political entity, the ‘New English’, but to the ‘Old English’, of Anglo-Norman descent like the family names of Burke, Nagle and Nugent, and historically Catholic. His family were converts to the Church of Ireland, much like the conversos or ‘New Christians’ of 16th-century Spain, who maintained in private the religion they were ...”

“... threats and intellectual gestures, seems far away, but almost as distant is the world of Philip Larkin, with all its equally carefully set-up shabbinesses, contrivances and confidences which only ten years ago seemed an exact and honest image of the way people actually lived. To the poetry of every age its dream and image of itself, but there seems ...”

“... closer to the outlines of Theroux’s history. Neither book is imaginable without the precedent of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound (1981) – in which Zuckerman’s succès de scandale Carnovsky stands in for Portnoy’s Complaint – and The Counterlife (1986). Theroux followed Roth into a hall of mirrors from which it is hard to find the exit. Roth’s ...”

“... Sabbath ‘anti-heretical stereotypes’ unleashed from above were ‘only a secondary element’. Norman Cohn is taken to task for exaggerating their importance. The claim is unpersuasive. Cohn’s demonstration of the constancy of the stereotype of the secret sect – practising promiscuity, blasphemy, anthropophagy – from pagan accusations against the ...”

“... older sister Rita. Rita Lydig – her second husband was a wealthy New York businessman, Philip Lydig – was like one of Edith Wharton’s spoiled anti-heroines: sexy, insane, theatrical, improvident and entrancingly beautiful. She appears – a wanton in Worth gowns – in countless memoirs of Old New York. Men held her in near-cultic ...”

“... revolution and its social tremors, unlike the exploding confetti and frantic wrist action of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (all three published in one wigging-out year).Couples was sexually explicit but morally serious, psychologically astute and starkly pore-examining, a John Cassavetes ensemble transplanted ...”