“... is compelled to treat as a second nature. This claim, too, had been made first in architecture, by Robert Venturi: ‘The main justification of the honky-tonk elements in the architectural order is their very existence. They are what we have.’ Eventually, Post-Modernism itself would be given a honky-tonk logo and shorthand promo: around 1992, its friends and ...”

“... Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what he really means is ...”

“... compared with later examples. In 1983, Elvis Costello’s poignant ‘Shipbuilding’ (sung by Robert Wyatt) was so sidelong a comment on the human costs and economic benefits of the Falklands War that you had to be told that’s what it was. I even have a sneaking sympathy for the campaign agent who chose Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the ...”

“... and immediately set himself up in the business of selling Ghana.With an American partner called Robert Ellis, he set up a fake company, which he called the Bureau of African Affairs and Industrial Development, in a business district outside Philadelphia. The bureau sold greeting cards with Nkrumah’s face on them, and claimed to have obtained a licence to ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”

“... a small horde of Belle Epoque celebrities – everybody from Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of ...”

“... North Korea’ with fire and fury was a rhetorically extreme example in a long record. Eisenhower, Ford and Clinton all made similar threats. In response to North Korean missile tests, the US twice fired conventional missiles from South Korea into the Sea of Japan. In 2019, it withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Trump administration ...”

“... where, he says, there is no wildlife left. The Lea, in the reach between Hackney Marshes and Old Ford Lock, is a dead river. The towpath, running alongside, and trumpeted as a green route to the Olympic site, has been closed to pedestrians and cyclists (who have been engaged in several mass protests). I notice, in a photograph of the Albion Drive cave, an ...”

“... that was it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I ...”

“... Angola. One of them was Mozambique. In 1963, Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of Frelimo, approached Robert Kennedy in the hope of securing funding. Kennedy was impressed with Mondlane and offered him $60,000 through the Ford Foundation, which, as Williams points out, was closely linked to the CIA. This didn’t sit well with ...”

“... loved one taken away by masked good old boys with customised AR-15s, death’s head armbands and Ford F-150 technicals. Walter’s act of homebringing also involves a more subliminal journey from the past back to the American present. After all, to Americans, the country’s own four-year 19th-century shriek of bifurcated patriotism, murderous ingenuity and ...”

“... years. But China was now ‘Red China’, and the government needed experts. In the late 1950s the Ford Foundation provided funds for a committee to promote scholarship on the country. A few years later, the CIA provided a subvention for the publication of the China Quarterly, still the pre-eminent journal in the field. Its inaugural issue featured a debate ...”

“... The​ Soft Machine drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and prudence, ‘imported tea’ every afternoon, ‘with some little tea wafers’, partly in order to ease himself off martinis (Elsie, his ‘Pam’, disapproved of his drinking) – but otherwise everything is different ...”

“... path to early success, particularly her mentor, Ted Morrison, who got her invited to dinner with Robert Frost (Rich charmed him) and who groomed her for the Yale Younger Poets competition judged by Auden, which she won in 1950. The prize put her on the map. A Change of World, published the following year, garnered respectful reviews; she shone at public ...”

“... entered the federal prison on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, where he discovered Scientology, read Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and first heard the Beatles. From Scientology, he took ideas that he would combine with Carnegie’s: let the other fellow think he was an immortal spiritual being; exploit his traumatic ...”