“... of Southern California and calling the charismatic psychopath at their centre Russell instead of Charles. The cult’s celebrity patron is called Mitch instead of Dennis Wilson, and the group lives rent-free on a ranch where they help raise llamas instead of renting out horses, as the Manson family did at Spahn Ranch. Cline also removes all reference to ...”

“... and the proto-Pop artists Joe Brainard, Norman Bluhm, Mike Goldberg, Franz Kline, Al Leslie and Larry Rivers, on paintings, prints, collages, ‘artists’ books’ and short films: these comprise the core of the exhibition. There are also portraits and other works linked to O’Hara: Johns’s big black canvas, with silverware attached, now looks like a ...”

“... he uses whatever maps he can find: the theoretical writings of Isidore Isou and Guy Debord, Larry Clark’s pictures, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, Theodor Adorno (in particular his great and mordant Minima Moralia), Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, Abiezer Coppe, Georges Bataille. Oddly, the name William Blake never ...”

“... by recycling elements of his earlier short stories as subplots, while the main plot – in which Larry Darrell travels to India in search of enlightenment, apparently finds it, and then decides to become a mystical taxi driver – is strikingly ridiculous. When Larry spends forty pages explaining ‘the three ...”

“... American know-all. August Vanags was unworthy of being the author of his own book. Put him on Larry King, and he’d unsell Boy 381 at the rate of thousands a minute. So instead they packed him off to Whidbey Island with an ex-directory phone number and refused all interviews on his behalf. And with good reason, since even Lucy – though perhaps ...”

“... of Poetry of February 1931 had among its contributors Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi (another Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a ...”

“... were striking. In most parts of the Holy Roman Empire, the Carolina Criminal Code promulgated by Charles V held good into the 17th century. It prescribed the death penalty not just for murder and treason, but for arson, blasphemy, counter-feiting, conjuring, witchcraft, abortion, rape, unnatural sex, highway robbery, robbery or attempted robbery with ...”

“... United States Jail in Washington DC, in the cell that had held James Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau. He not only escaped from it, but also, on the way out, opened the cells of two other inmates and made them switch places. Legend has it that he asked the occupant of one of the cells what he’d done to get locked up. ‘I’m a ...”

“... agency, which runs the transportation hubs of the metropolitan area, owns the site. The developer Larry Silverstein? His group still holds the lease to the Twin Towers, which remains valid. The city? The state? The Federal Government? The families of the victims? Lower Manhattanites? All New Yorkers? Americans in general? Citizens of the world? Who counts in ...”

“... moguls David Geffen and Steven Spielberg are joined by tech billionaires including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and his former colleague Eric Schmidt. Microsoft’s Paul Allen owned one, as does Charles Simonyi. The tech-bros have grown their businesses courtesy of handsome government contracts and ...”

“... Wood, Sarah Bernhardt and the Ballets Russes. Dickens was fascinated by the performing style of Charles Mathews, a blacked-up minstrel, and put it to use in his own public readings, though without the burned cork. T.S. Eliot revered Marie Lloyd, and the present queen’s grandmother, the hatchet-faced Queen Mary, was an improbable fan of Albert ...”

“... not, as might have been expected, use Smith as a gateway to a nice fresh-faced Yalie called, say, Charles (‘Chip’) Staunton Webster III, with a law opening in Daddy’s firm in Boston and a summer place in New Hampshire. Instead, she took up acting, still very much a déclassé occupation, and decided to go to Hollywood. She got there, Kelley claims, by ...”

“... than other European languages including French, Italian and even Latin. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V picked out the roles to which different languages were best suited: Spanish to speak with God, French to speak with men, Italian with women and German to horses. A similar remark has been attributed to the Prussian Frederick the Great, who added that ...”

“... and Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone? I read Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run, and books by Charles Colson, books which are still in print years after their first publication, Christian megasellers. I also spent a lot of time in prayer, and in daydreams. I was completely happy. I was a solipsist. I was saved. Then, the August after I left school, guided ...”

“... taken for granted by millions, including possibly the same 86 per cent of Americans who told the Larry King Show that they believed in aliens and almost certainly the proportion of that number who say that those aliens have the same supernatural abilities as Lucifer and the fallen angels. Today’s testimony doesn’t stretch that far. In fact, it’s fairly ...”