“... ones. You wouldn’t confuse Lerner’s voice or his plot structures with Jonathan Franzen’s or Sam Lipsyte’s or Benjamin Kunkel’s. But in moments of high capering, Ben and Adam can seem to be iterations of a collective character we’ve met in other novels of the last twenty years. As 19th-century Russians fight duels and gamble, late 20th and ...”

“... lifelike head of the Motion Picture Association of America – one-time former fixer in the LBJ White House, recently chair of the Hollywood summit to discuss ways of supporting the war against terrorism – curdled our blood twenty years ago with similar threats. ‘The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology is to the American film producer ...”

“... so badly burned that he wanted nothing to do with it. When he came under strong Congressional and White House pressure to start a new Red hunt in 1930, he argued that such a thing was strictly illegal – and since the agitators were mainly in the unions, wouldn’t it be better to hand the whole thing over to the Department of Labor? The project quietly ...”

“... or at least has done since 1913 – Bordwell offers us an illustration from a film called Red and White Roses, released in that year. Of course, not even Bazin was arguing that montage was all bad, or that films could or should abandon it entirely, and the idea that film history consists of battles between the two approaches is as rigid and unhandy as the ...”

“... a writer to tolerate even minor flaws.’Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ by Sam Slote, Marc Mamigonian and John Turner takes on board all the research and scholarship done since Don Gifford’s groundbreaking Notes for Joyce (1974, revised and republished in 1988 as Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman). It shows Joyce ...”

“... rubble of the Berlin Wall had been tidied away.In hindsight, four figures in particular stand out: Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard and Ross Perot. Francis was, and remains, a comparatively obscure figure in American conservative intellectual and journalistic circles. But he was decisive in introducing to mainstream discourse the racist ideas of ...”

“... was given to her artistic struggles by a stroke of good luck. She came to the attention of Sam McClure, the New York editor and reformist publisher, who liked her stories and published her first collection, The Troll Garden. This was the real beginning of her writing career. He employed her directly as well, and assigned her various muck-raking ...”

“... to Toronto, where she is picked up by a sponsoring relative who takes her to a blues party. A white neighbour complains at the din, and the West Indians insult and threaten him with the ‘Untarryo Human Right Commission’. The ‘racialists’, they explain, ‘owe us. And we going to collect.’ Another more spiteful story portrays a black ...”

“... to Madison – but my host Professor D.J. and me. That’s Charlie Feathers, the Memphis musician. Sam Phillips at Sun Studio never knew quite what to do with Charlie; tried to steer him to the country end of things when he was more truly a rockabilly. Too bad for Charlie. Made for a difficult life, or more difficult than it should have been. He’s a better ...”

“... spirits in the form of ectoplasmic structures, or ‘pseudo-pods’. These long viscous skeins of white stuff, which sometimes passed as if miraculously through a gauzy gag tied over Eva C.’s face, were thought to be ‘ideoplasts’ – projections of the medium’s mind. The photographer and impresario of these séances was Mme Juliette Bisson, a rich ...”

“... that patented the walk-and-talk, with characters trading quips at speed as they zipped down the White House corridors. CJ, Josh, Donna, Sam: quick-thinking, smart, hilarious, kind – this was a world you wanted to be in! I wanted to be in Lorrie Moore world, too, even if her characters were stuck in middle ...”

“... topical image of the RAF roundel’. It’s a patriotic emblem, especially when viewed in the red, white and blue of Technicolor, but the Archers was notable for its use of Pressburger’s fellow exiles: the German Alfred Junge, whom Powell called ‘the greatest art director that films have ever known’; the Polish composer Allan Gray (whose real name was ...”

“... sprawl scattered like so much confetti over the gnarly green terrain. In the distance, the tall white cluster of buildings that formed downtown Los Angeles poked through a corona of smog. Coming into view below was my destination: the 480-acre subdivision established in 1887 and named ‘Hollywood’ by a real estate speculator’s wife because, she ...”

“... numerous voice-overs and adverts for car manufacturers. He was also the author of a novel, Man in White (1986), about the life of St Paul, with whom he liked to compare himself: ‘Also interesting, for me at least,’ he writes in Cash (1997), ‘were the parallels between Paul and myself. He went out to conquer the world in the name of Jesus Christ; we in ...”

“... caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s White House was run to astrological time, and its chief spent his evenings discussing Armageddon theology with strangers. Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the ...”