“... socialist candidate for the presidency. Still, as Barthes said of his meal with Giscard, ‘a myth hunter … must hunt everywhere.’ That lunch, which took place in a flat in the Marais on 25 February 1980, with Lang doing the cooking, apparently went quite well. But then Barthes, en route back to his office, walked into the path of a laundry van, which left ...”

“... of southern Mexico in 1955. R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president of J.P. Morgan and amateur mushroom hunter, was convinced that hallucinogenic mushrooms had been used in the sacrament of an ancient and long-suppressed pre-Christian global religion. On the trail of a Mazatec tradition that reportedly survived in the mountain villages of Oaxaca, he sought out a ...”

“... House’s ‘Special’ The Falkland Islands Dispute – International Dimensions Professor James Fawcett agrees on line 3 that ‘the determination of territorial title, when it is disputed, is a complex issue of fact and law,’ and asserts on line 31 that ‘the territorial title to the islands... must be accorded to the United Kingdom.’ On this ...”

“... on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. It aims to look freshly at these artists and to ask again why their originality matters. Names like Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery are frequently dropped and sometimes ...”

“... or not this bit of gossip is true, that ending would have fitted the epic sweep of the movie. But James Harvey found the happy ending a relief: ‘Sensible people don’t kill or maim each other for revenge or honour or empty matters of pride.’† And for Pippin the happy ending fits because the film was not really an epic to begin with: Dunson’s cattle ...”

“... to succeed in the small and still male-dominated enclave of SF, the talented woman who writes as James Tiptree Jr was obliged to keep her femininity a close secret.) In the 20th century, genre, or ‘category’, fiction has often enforced pseudonymy for the commercial reason that the author’s name must chime harmoniously with the product. Thus, in the ...”

“... to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its horrible secret in the process: it ...”

“... Not really, Edwards thinks. Can the journal be described, as the historian James Clifford argued in a famous essay in 1981, as ‘ethnographic surrealism’? Hardly. Was Leiris really in pursuit of the exotic ‘black Edens’ he had glimpsed with the arrival of jazz in Paris after World War One? Pretty much: they led him to Africa in ...”

“... been explosively responsive to every experience, to have been courageous whether as a woodsman, a hunter after big game, a cross-country horseman, or a writer driven by penury – one cannot say poverty because he was a spendthrift with a folie de grandeur – to earn writing-time by any and every means from painting roofs in his meagre and sometimes mean ...”

“... Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding the waves of this ...”

“... Mazzucato of University College London, and business gurus like Paul Hawken (co-author, with Hunter and Amory Lovins, of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, published in 1999). The green-growthers’ pitch is an appeal to the magic of innovation and technology. Self-described ‘techno-optimists’, such as the Financial Times ...”

“... with his impersonations. One evening Omai, the Tahitian tribal chief, comes to dinner (her brother James had been on Captain Cook’s second voyage). There is Joshua Reynolds and Richard Sheridan, and later Madame de Staël and Talleyrand. In her ostensibly private records of her life, Burney often keeps pace with current events and personalities, providing ...”

“... to Arms. The desire for combat is paramount. ‘Not everyone feels such things so intensely,’ James Fenton writes in his introduction to the Everyman edition of the Collected Stories. Many are simply relieved not to have to fight. But the real test for someone of Hemingway’s cast of mind is: to serve in war as a soldier under military ...”

“... colour co-ordinated with the favours of the London Overground, had been made for a French hunter who wanted to stand out when the bullets were flying in some seasonal avian cull. Aylward was a veteran of pilgrim routes. He had completed the Camino de Santiago from St Jean Pied-de-Port, the full voie lactée, with a final push to Finisterre. (He wanted ...”

“... so close to the leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from ...”