“... was always ready to be flipped, hoisted or clipped onto aerial wires – hands-free, of course, wearing the signature ‘Britney mic’.The perfect pop star, then, though not especially interested in music. When she was paired with au courant collaborators – Southern hip-hop minimalists the Neptunes, the Swedish super-producers Max Martin and Bloodshy ...”

“... too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has ...”

“... the British army and defend the Soviet Union. In the December 1942 wedding photograph my father is wearing a cheeky smile and a British army uniform. He fought, like a number of British communists, at Monte Cassino. My mother, whose father was the prime minister of the Punjab, impulsively donated most of her wedding jewellery to the CPI. Before all that she ...”

“... 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 ...”