“... already becoming too much. Kazin and Ann Birstein had written an introduction to the Diary of Anne Frank, and as a critic Kazin had praised Elie Wiesel’s Night. But over the years he cooled towards Wiesel. He and Bellow and Wiesel were all flown to Bergen-Belsen, and then to Israel, in 1970, by a Jewish philanthropist. Wiesel gave a speech: Everything ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so well. Once again we are presented with the lives of the saints of middle management, Leadbeater’s magnificent pilgrims are full of daring. They struggle for personal fulfilment and venture capital. They ...”

“... that then ruled the Arsenal changing rooms. Adams’s treatment of Bergkamp is nothing if not frank. His first serious reference to him is to note that he refused Adams’s offer of help with his fear of flying (a fear Adams shared) – ‘it didn’t seem like he wanted any help at that time.’ His second is to report the telling of home ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... its use of brickwork to such canonical Modernist buildings as Dudok’s project at Hilversum and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House.It was this Modernist aspect of Scott’s architecture that made possible de Meuron and Herzog’s own neo-Modernist or, better, ‘post-Minimalist’ adaptation of his building, essentially by stacking a set of boxes in the ...”

“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”