“... somewhat by the singer’s sense of his own life lacking much direction or purpose; and it’s more than aware that dying young isn’t on its own enough of an achievement to turn someone into James Dean. ‘Too Late to Die Young’ points up, too, the contradictions of being both a star and a human being, in terms not only of what consitutes the good ...”

“... and Where They Came From by André Bernard (Norton, $19.95). Literary models don’t get much more famous than the Delamare case: in that (obvious) sense, the pronouncement of Flaubert’s which Bernard takes for his title is transparently absurd. In another (no less obvious) sense, however, Flaubert couldn’t be ...”

“... how disproportionate it was, and right, too, that being white is one of the factors that make it more likely your murder will be news (others include being young, female, photogenic and having a name that’s short enough to fit across the front page of a tabloid newspaper). More recently, Blair’s been unfairly attacked ...”

“... bench as Labour’s Spokesman on Trade and Industry, he said in an LRB Diary: ‘There is nothing more ridiculous than the notion that socialism is inexorably dying . . . The world we face today makes a socialist approach all the more relevant . . . The 1990s will not see the continuing triumph of the market, but its ...”

“... biography of something which couldn’t in all honesty be said ever to have had a life. One of the more glaring recent additions to the latter category is Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography by Dominic Streatfeild (Virgin, £20). How, even supposing a ‘biography’ of the drug is possible, would you set about getting it authorised? Who would you ask? George ...”

“... book set’, and the Observer has said that, ‘as literary festivals go, Port Eliot could not be more rock’n’roll if it tried.’ The telling phrase here of course being ‘as literary festivals go’, since, let’s face it, writers aren’t popstars, however much some of them would like to be, and publishing isn’t rock’n’roll. Twenty years ...”

“... teachers found him ‘quite satisfactory’, but thought he ‘would be better still if he brought more enthusiasm to his work’. He’s quoted in Crap Towns: ‘I wish I could think of just one nice thing I could tell you about Hull, oh yes . . . It’s very nice and flat for cycling.’ Crap Towns lists famous residents, but not famous disparagers. Spike ...”

“... in the medieval Umbrian town of Orvieto every autumn since 1996. Spasso is an Italian noun that more or less corresponds to the English ‘leisure’. Andare a spasso is ‘to go for a walk’; essere a spasso is ‘to be out of work’: mandare qualcuno a spasso is ‘to give someone the sack’, not to send them out for a stroll. Gusto means ...”

“... the English Revolution which has dominated historical thinking ever since. In 1952, he published More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, a competent but not epoch-making work. Since then he has published no single full-length work of historical research. The editor of the volume under review says that ‘for over thirty years … he has served as the ...”

“... somebody resting from a difficult job of labour.’ This is another loss of innocence, altogether more private than the death of the president, and altogether more real. Houston ‘felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child. He was 18 years old.’ Later ...”

“... And as a result, everybody treated me like someone they could talk to.Journalistically, what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the ...”

“... McCain Bill, it’s now illegal for Americans to commit torture anywhere in the world: all the more reason to outsource it. Thanks to the heroic drudgery of a number of planespotters, there is documented evidence that these flights stop over in Britain. It makes you wonder if those planespotters who got into trouble in Greece a few years ago were arrested ...”

“... that the appetite for reality TV on this side of the Atlantic has abated. Big Brother 4 received more applications than any of its predessors. The Sun – which, just when you think it can’t get any tawdrier, will pull another grubby hanky from its sleeve – has proffered a bounty of £50,000 to the first (straight) couple to have sex on the show. That ...”

“... missing’. This is in apparent contradiction to Newcomb’s preface, where she writes: ‘The more I discovered about angels, I realised the less I actually knew about them.’ In answer to the frequently asked question whether or not they are ‘the messengers of God as the Bible claimed’, Newcomb says that ‘one of the translations of Angel is ...”

“... commented that it sounded much like the writing of Gertrude Stein. Quite so; and how much more difficult it must be to recapture the character of talk before the 20th century. Most of the contributors to Mr Quennell’s volume grope around the problem and then turn to something else more tangible. Hilde Spiel writes ...”