“... a Promethean stealer of automotive fire, chained to his own inarticulate drives as one bound to a rock; a winged messenger-god in a Mercury; a naked Eros. In Campbell’s account of the legend, the last of these figures is rampant. Cassady appears here under the double aspect of danger and desire. The importance of his role, allowing the spectator Kerouac to ...”

“... sick and tired of? How do you remain the party of business and a party of the majority when, as David Rockefeller complained, ‘people are blaming business and the enterprise system for all the problems of our society’? How to finesse the passage of regulatory legislation in the areas of occupational health and safety, the environment and consumer ...”

“... Bye Bye’ by NSYNC. When shortly afterwards a demo of a song by the vastly successful rock band Metallica turned up on Napster, the industry finally roused itself to action. Conglomerates such as Universal spent much of the decade engaged in legal pursuit of bedroom file-sharers, many of whom were allowed to walk free by sympathetic juries. One of ...”

“... Most of these kids turned out to be runaways from Middle America who had flipped on too many Sgt Rock and Fantastic Four comic books. My favourite was a 16-year-old from Tennessee who called himself ‘Kid Blue’. When I last heard from him he was phoning (he said) from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where the CIA had kidnapped and were torturing ...”

“... it, and pressure going out from it – of certain American independent film-makers and un-American rock acts than it has of Chekhov. The suburban ennui is familiar from Todd Solondz. In fact, Solondz’s new film, Storytelling, is cut from the same cloth as The Corrections, filled with the same sense of altered usage and the uncanny images which flood the ...”

“... the city lively and cosmopolitan. Ida painted, using ‘an old man model’ who sat ‘like a rock’. They made friends. By the autumn she was pregnant and adapting her wardrobe. Adaline was asked for a ‘loose black lace evening blouse … with long sleeves but not transparent – & a little low neck cut round – and perhaps streamers down the ...”

“... And indeed, in his 1862 book The Illustrated Natural History – Birds, the Rev. J.G. Wood, the David Attenborough of his day, states that the cream-coloured courser ‘seems to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new resonance. Arnold ...”

“... back is as dry as the Mojave, ready. Cranston’s comedy is to be a half-step ahead of the beat, David Duchovny’s to be a half-step behind. In a moving car this balances, like when you perfectly pace a moving walkway so it appears to be standing still. In their silences they are talking about ambition, acknowledging strengths and weaknesses, they are ...”

“... slipped from public consciousness (if you exclude being one of the inspirations behind Brighton Rock) because he did not have the foresight to appoint his own biographer. The Krays, those upstanding venture capitalists, made no such error. They looked like businessmen, only more so. They thought like businessmen, a steady expansion from a secured ...”

“... the greatest ideas.’ Rejecting one of them, a pitch for a Marvel project constructed around David Schwimmer from Friends, the executives reached a consensus that ‘David Schwimmer had no charisma and was a little bit derided.’ Then they high-fived one another over Lee’s head.Professional humiliations didn’t ...”

“... and natural history within a ‘big history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to ...”

“... washed out the rubble. Over the course of 100,000 years, this ice sheet tore the top 250 metres of rock and soil from the surface of the Swiss Central Plateau. At its peak, about 24,000 years ago, it extended across all the northern cantons. It did not reach the Jura or Ticino. In 1964, Dr Franz Merke, a Basel surgeon, showed that the extent of the ice sheet ...”

“... families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative ...”

“... to be done to explain that his paintings were not just garish expressions of his own neuroses. David Sylvester and Michel Leiris, who both wrote perceptively about his work, emerged as friends and champions. As early as 1951, Sylvester asserted that Bacon was ‘the major English artist of his time’. He soon had access to Bacon’s studio and saw ...”

“... to fabricate a first bomb,’ and eight or nine kilograms for subsequent ones. According to David Albright, one of the best and most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the ...”