“... if everyone is trying to become the worst possible version of themselves. Here are Eugene Landy, Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Murry Wilson. Then there are the scarcely believable transformations of the boy-child Brian Wilson. How did he jump through the hula hoops of novelty pop to arrive, in the blink of an ‘I’, at a place where it seemed perfectly ...”

“... view, ‘a wonderful rhetoric of faith in the rebirth of the Sacred City of the Revolution’. Charles Nicholl repeats Delahaye’s story to the effect that Rimbaud enlisted in a Communard militia, but like most commentators, believes this is a ‘tenuous anecdote’ which doesn’t line up with the dates of Rimbaud’s visits to Paris in 1871. Rickword ...”

“... by powered traffic. ‘London Particular’, on the other hand, had a much longer history. Charles Dickens is supposed to have thought it up for an 1851 article about conditions in Spitalfields, quoting a weaver who complained of a ‘black London genuine particular’ which stained clothes. He repeated the phrase famously in Bleak ...”

“... most nakedly intimate and engaging of the tests, Ann Buchanan, the former wife of the Beat poet Charles Plymell, stares unblinking at the camera for a minute or more before she starts to weep, the tears forming gradually, then running slowly down her cheeks. At this point, to continue to gaze at this woman’s face is an unsettling, yet strangely beautiful ...”

“... By the age of 30, Belle was willing to settle for marriage to her brother’s tutor, the Swiss Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière, and to settle down in a ‘reasonable’ but boring life near Neuchâtel. Isabelle de Charrière’s existence is minutely detailed in this fine biography by C.P. Courtney, which is three times longer than Wood’s life of ...”

“... of that great American aesthetic invention: the long, open-ended poem of Whitman, Pound and Charles Olson. Jefferson’s insistence on the provisional nature of Notes is, like the title of Wallace Stevens’s monumental ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, a sly boast about the inability of formal systems to keep up with the fecundity and fluidity of ...”

“... Murdoch. He also raises the most interesting unsolved question at the London end of the hoax. Charles Douglas-Home, editor of the Times, was told on the Saturday morning before the Sunday Times commenced publication that Lord Dacre had changed his mind about the authenticity of the ‘diaries’. Why, then, did he not inform ...”

“... a precedent for Eisenstein’s 1930 fiasco with Dreiser in Erich Von Stroheim’s with McTeague by Frank Norris, made into the ten hours of Greed in 1923 and then cut (by a studio that had merged to become MGM) down to a quarter of its length. Greed was another depiction of American society and morals, and an extravagant work of ‘art!’, and so was bad ...”

“... with inscrutable road signs’. What she seems to have in mind is something drawn by Charles Addams, homes for ghouls rather than the headquarters of what is commonly assumed to be a form of therapy. Once an analyst has completed his training he begins to hope that he will, in time, become a training analyst himself; or, as Green puts it, be ...”

“... in the East began at 25, when she spent six months at the Embassy in Tehran with her uncle, Sir Frank Lascelles. The book she wrote describing her experiences, Safar Nameh, or Persian Pictures, is vivid and colourful, with a sharp eye for detail – not unlike many of Freya Stark’s early sketches. But she was also a scholar, and went on to produce a ...”

“... by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is still contested.) Twenty-five years before I went to Loos for the centenary of the ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... two reasons. First, the Contract was the most completely poll-driven manifesto in modern history. Frank Luntz, the Republican Party’s opinion-meister, ran questions by focus-groups and other poll-fodder until he found topics (like lower taxation) which rang a bell. If the bell rang, the plank went into the platform. If not, not. Most people don’t want a ...”

“... on the sweetness of spring – and aims to steal and blasphemously deface the works he pilfers. Frank Kermode calls that seminal poem a work of ‘decreation’, and the figure that Eliot aspires to be is that of decreator. The poet is not now – is no more – godlike, but is instead a vandal, a criminal, an annihilator of all that’s made to a murderous ...”

“... the rasping crackle of a base-set, came and went in the room. Our meeting was short and not very frank. We sat with three men in uniform. I’d come to Kosovo, I said, to trace the family of some refugees and knew that here only a small number of the people displaced during the Serbian offensive – 250,000 according to the UN, nearly double that by the ...”