“... o’clock in the morning. They’re wrong. I nearly died in an experimental-plane accident with John Denver. People would talk and forget everything they said. Several writers blabbed away entire books in the corner of Blacks. Out of the blue, in the Union, somebody asked her bullying husband for a divorce. Hurrah! Up in the Academy, Auberon Waugh, happy in ...”

“... like the Loshes who took ideas seriously and were inclined towards radicalism. Sarah’s father John, born in 1757, was the eldest of four remarkable brothers. Their wealth came partly from land and later from the alkali works the family developed at the Walker colliery. The extended network of cousins and relatives by marriage (a number of whom were the ...”

“... Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next ...”

“... scene after another, exhibiting that scepticism towards conventional representation that Jenny Turner has suggested is a special feature of contemporary West of Scotland writing. The irony is that as Tom’s escapades become progressively entangled, so he falls victim to his own residual belief in plots and schemes. Death and destruction seem to dog his ...”

“... whip up rural Georgia into an anti-semitic frenzy. In the midst of all this, the outgoing Governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. The Governor’s own investigation had uncovered a conclusive flaw in Conley’s story: if the sweeper had used the elevator merely to transport the dead body to the basement, as he claimed, then ...”

“... arguing about whether the night sky, riven with fire and the beams of searchlights, is more like a Turner or a John Martin. Further down St James’s Street, on the opposite pavement from where a club that is more or less Brooks’s has been bombed, ‘a group of progressive novelists in firemen’s uniform were squirting a ...”

“... and recorded from close hand the eruption of Tambora in 1815 (the debris from which furnished Turner with his finest sunsets), as well as founding Singapore. The zoo he conceived was finally opened in 1828 but Raffles never saw it: he had died from a cerebral haemorrhage in 1826, aged 45. With Raffles gone, the early ZSL members could not agree what their ...”

“... installations and performances constitute a lurid confessional – had been shortlisted for the Turner Prize. The postwar upsurge in self-portraiture is amply documented in Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones’s anthology of texts and images, The Artist’s Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and ...”

“... Among the critics of Obama’s policies towards the auto industry is the Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the longest serving member of the House, and a long-time ally of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. ‘I’m troubled by the different treatment of auto companies … and the treatment of those good-hearted people such as AIG and all ...”

“... There were closer friends who shunned him: Beardsley, for instance, who owed him so much; John Gray, an early lover, for whose Silverpoints, prettiest of Nineties poetry-books, Wilde had paid; Lilly Langtry, to whom he had, at one time, brought a daily lily, and who claimed to have sent him money without having actually done so. Beerbohm did not spurn ...”

“... Francis Coppola’s fratricidal Michael Corleone in the Cold War utopia of the Fifties, or by The Turner Diaries’ stone-faced Timothy McVeigh in 1995, just months after the United States began a shift from the republic of inclusion shaped by Lincoln, Carnegie, and King to the republic of exclusion prophesied by Cotton Mather, ...”

“... does not work, partly because her sabbatical coincides with that of a younger colleague, Fred Turner. Fred happens to be married to Zimmern’s daughter Roo; his trip to London to research into John Gay starts badly because he and Roo have quarrelled, and he has had to come to London without her. Arriving in damp ...”

“... Hollywood film noir, so I came to Bogart (as to Cagney, Raft, Edward G., Stanwyck, Hayworth, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Gloria Grahame) retrospectively and as a ready-made – I think I need to use the word – icon. They were vast beings moving across the screen, on prints patinated with the time that had passed. The women were beautiful in a glamorously ...”

“... so that the frontier was now seen as a gateway to world power and economic abundance. (John F. Kennedy’s reference to a ‘new frontier’ in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1960 carried this implication.) The myth of a West dominated by small family farms (Jefferson’s vision of the future) had already given way ...”

“... was brought up by his paternal grandparents, while Crippen ‘turned his sights east’. Cora Turner, born Kunegunde Mackamotzki, and later to restyle herself as Belle Elmore, was the daughter of a hard-up German immigrant family in Brooklyn. She had an (illegal) abortion, aged eighteen, after her domestic employer got her pregnant. Dr George Clinton ...”