“... Who is worse, the cannibals who eat their enemies or the French who torture them? Montaigne’s frank self-revelation, fluid understanding of the self and cultural relativism can feel surprisingly modern. So can his views on gender: ‘I say that male and female are cast in the same mould: save for education and custom the difference between them is not ...”

“... And then, to go on in a slighdy different vein, doesn’t Goldsmith’s = CalArts and doesn’t Michael Craig Martin = Michael Asher, and therefore isn’t it only to be expected that Sensation = Helter Skelter and/or Scene of the Crime, to cite the two definitive exhibitions of new Los Angeles art. This is not to say ...”

“... to the newspapers attacked the influx of Jews, others also came to their defence, most notably Michael Davitt, the leader of the Land League. ‘The Jews have never to my knowledge done any injury to Ireland,’ he wrote in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal in 1893. ‘Like our own race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever ...”

“... Mickey at story meetings’; until 1946 Disney also voiced him, in falsetto. In another new Life, Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, the studio head is seen by animators acting out ‘how a Chinese turtle should dance’, or doing ‘any of the people in the pictures, valets, anything – he all of a sudden was a valet.’ One such episode was burned in ...”

“... to exploit popular resentment, this time of political jobbery, after Millbank had chopper-dropped Frank Dobson in as the official Labour candidate. To his credit, Mullin recognises the tackiness of this fixing operation, and confronts Blair’s adviser Jonathan Powell, who blithely admits that ‘we fucked up . . . but we couldn’t allow a bozo like ...”

“... to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. He would like to have written Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Threaded into each of his plays is a coded tribute: an MP in Dirty Linen, a clerk in The Invention of Love and two characters in Leopoldstadt are all called Chamberlain, doffing their caps to Stoppard’s long-term assistant, Jacky ...”

“... towns – an example, Goebbels said, of ‘England’s assassination of European culture’. Hans Frank, governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, said his aim was ‘to elevate the Polish people to the honour of European civilisation’, even as he trashed and looted the vast art collections of the Polish aristocracy, banned performances of Chopin and sent ...”

“... Miller has overslept’. Whether the reference to Gay Talese’s famous Esquire piece, ‘Frank Sinatra has a cold’, was intentional hardly matters. The line has been used in so many cover stories it has become its own trope.Despite the big claims and obvious changes, it’s difficult to imagine the print magazine carrying on for much longer in its ...”

“... also had two children). Di Prima wrote plays, acted, directed and produced. They put on dramas by Frank O’Hara and Robert Duncan at various downtown venues and broadcast Antonin Artaud’s radio piece ‘To Have Done with the Judgment of God’, complete with ‘gongs and blood-curdling screams’, to the whole of Bleecker Street. In 1965 di Prima founded ...”

“... That was not all. The confessions were backed by the most overwhelming scientific evidence. Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, had found traces of nitroglycerine on the young woman’s hands as soon as she’d been arrested. He’d also found nitroglycerine, he said, on her duffle bag, which had been rescued from one of the freight wagons ...”

“... pretty coarse at the arts of primitive accumulation), the promotions of Charles Keating (S&Ls) and Michael Milken, high priest of the junk bond, now facing ten years in the Federal penitentiary. There’s rarely been a city harder to ‘see’, through a windscreen caked with the alternative myths of the boosters and the noirs, nor one about whose history and ...”

“... Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (aka Henry Miller); and Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan as the literary editors. As Dearborn notes in a wonderful chapter on life at the Villa Seurat, Miller’s Paris address, ‘most of the editors were ...”

“... Many Hollywood stars, for example, attend AA, but you won’t find yourself sitting next to Michael Douglas unless you happen to be in the industry and making seven-figure alimony payments. There is no copyright on the 12-step formula and any number of look-alike therapies have borrowed it: Al-Anon, Al-Ateen, Chocanon, MA (Marijuana Anonymous), Weight ...”

“... man has no ready buttress for his self-regard. That historian is fictional: he is the narrator of Michael Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly speaking, think ...”

“... on two antitheses which he does not appear to recognise: the contrast between Belfast and what Frank Wright calls the ‘unreformable’ decaying border areas, and between Ulster as the last representative of a British tradition and the rest of Britain which has, in the eyes of very many Protestants, betrayed it. The Ulster state was never a monolithic ...”