“... therefore became, so to speak, theatrical squared. Their situation also made them competitive. As Michael Young was to point out in The Rise of the Meritocracy, élites based on education lack the security of the old aristocracies of land and money. To live by one’s wits is a nervous business: every younger brain, each new foot on the educational ladder, is ...”

“... in order to attract commissions to review movies for newspapers and magazines. He eulogised Mack Sennett, screwball comedies and American actresses, who embodied ‘a kind of sex appeal unknown in Europe’. He had been in the US for barely a year before writing: ‘It is no longer a European observer who is making these observations.’ But it wasn’t ...”

“... may be yet. The closest parallels to Aids in epidemiological terms are syphilis and Hepatitis B. Michael Adler, in Aids and the Epidemics of History, lists the sudden appearance of syphilis (at the end of the 15th century), its asymptomatic carrier state and predominantly sexual means of transmission as the chief points of similarity. Hepatitis B, as Baruch ...”

“... in 1974 – followed a year later by a book-length interview with the American neoconservative Michael Ledeen, subsequently prominent in the Iran-Contra affair – that this huge enterprise had a major impact in the public sphere, attracting a barrage of criticism on the left as a rehabilitation of Fascism. By the time his fifth volume came out, in the ...”

“... instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour; the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie; McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits; the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid ...”