“... betrayed him to the local sheriff in Oklahoma), and Stash disappeared altogether. Even the amiable David, a Californian draft dodger and pacifist who lounged about the flat in an Easy Rider fringed jacket and cowboy boots, came back some nights with bleeding knuckles from pub fights he swore he hadn’t started. A commune has a natural life, and ours was ...”

“... created Islamic banks and loosened government regulations on public displays of piety, such as the wearing of headscarves in public buildings and prayer in the armed forces. In Islamic Revivalism in Syria (2011), the academic Line Khatib noted that Bashar’s conciliatory attitude towards Islam stood in marked contrast to the Baath Party’s original ...”

“... so on. Then he returns with elliptical reports from which the tribe’s younger storytellers, from David Foster Wallace on, set about extracting a style and a tone attuned to new ways of feeling and not feeling. One constant throughout these risk-filled spirit voyages has been DeLillo’s superbly take-it-or-leave-it posture towards the laity. ‘The writer ...”

“... ambivalent about children before she had them and their arrival did nothing to change her mind. David Nettleship John was ‘a comic little fellow’, she reported, ‘but he grumbles such a fearful lot. I think he would very much rather not have been created.’ As one pregnancy followed another she gave up painting and, since their income did not ...”

“... the satisfied patriarch’s pointing hand relegates at a stroke the family’s servant – wearing a lace ruff and mittens, and holding what appears to be a tray by his side – to the back of the sombrely unfurnished room, while also denoting his attentive son as heir. It’s hard to think of a more brazen, or more devastatingly banal, visualisation ...”

“... At a session with Roy Cohn in the Plaza Hotel in 1958, the Director of the FBI was allegedly wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig. He had make-up on, and false eyelashes. It was a very short skirt, and he was sitting there in the living room of the suite with his legs ...”

“... amount of Paul Bowles ‘that shameless faker’ – a view later revised – and his ‘dungaree-wearing Lizzie wife’, Jane, whose own arrangement was the mirror-image of Burroughs’s with Joan. There is also Auden’s secretary Alan Ansen, who gets no credit here for working on the Naked Lunch manuscript with Ginsberg. Auden himself is briskly invoked ...”

“... eccentrically unapproachable than ever. During a series of his 1989 shows he appeared on stage wearing not only a hood but a peaked cap to conceal his features still further. At other concerts he insisted the lights be turned down to the point of near-darkness. His live performances, which have been all but continuous for the last three years, are wildly ...”

“... the book mentions Kipling, Disraeli, Wilde, Koestler and Naipaul, the last two as foreign writers wearing ‘loud tweed jackets’ on the jackets of their books (Buruma himself sports one on his). National identity matters most at the borders, or on the fringes, and the narrator here, collecting expert testimony and seeking permission to see Ranji’s ...”

“... as she admits, ‘but if you wish to remember the past it helps to remember what you were wearing.’ She was the daughter of Liverpool people, a Welshwoman and a Russo-Finn: her father belonged to a Positivist sect, called the Church of Humanity, and her mother to the Church in Wales. The young Alice used to attend the English Congregational Church ...”

“... three or four years later at the New York Princeton Club; two tables away from me, he seemed to be wearing the same dark suit, white button-down shirt and nondescript tie that I remembered from Miss Whitehead’s shop. This time he was with a woman I took to be his wife, reading some galley proofs at her, she silently eating and drinking as he droned on and ...”

“... A moon-faced vicar or two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake of ‘unity’, a pro-Chinese ...”

“... a fancy hat, a bunch of curls like cabbages. They have grace, and the comic appeal of sculptures wearing gloves. Both her drawings and her poems show people caught in a lifetime’s grimace or grin: ‘With my looks I am bound to look simple or fast ... ’ Barbera and McBrien, perhaps prompted by a letter in which Stevie Smith explained that one volume of ...”

“... the lighter cavalry (Mlle de Scudéry, Voltaire, Alfieri, Nathaniel Lee, Gavin Hamilton, J.-L. David). However, Donaldson sharply registers the enormous popularity of the myth across the centuries, and the ways in which controversy has enlivened and enlarged it rather than killing it off. Readings of a myth become part of the myth, as Lévi-Strauss said of ...”

“... by modern science develops leaks’. And that’s why we’ve got Johnny Depp prancing around wearing earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie ...”