“... telethon after Hurricane Katrina with his outburst about how ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ – visited the White House to see his good friend Donald Trump. ‘You know, my dad and mom separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also, I’m married to a family that – you know, not a lot of male energy going ...”

“... can go back to women born over a hundred years ago. A late (and much missed) Stanford colleague, Ian Watt, once told me that as an undergraduate at Cambridge he was put in charge of escorting Gertrude Stein when she came to give a lecture in the 1930s. He took her to a tea shop for a snack and Virginia Woolf was sitting at the next table. (Neither great lady ...”

“... tack: ‘I am not a great writer. Neither are you.’)After Brophy’s first book of non-fiction, Black Ship to Hell, was published in 1962 (‘an exploitation of my discovery that … art is not in opposition to reason’), she began writing for the London Magazine, then for Karl Miller at the New Statesman (and, eventually, the LRB). ...”

“... moles and domestic terrorism.’ At the Munich Olympics two years earlier, the militant group Black September had killed eleven members of the Israeli team, and called for the release not just of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel but of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction in West Germany. Chancellor Willy Brandt resigned a month ...”

“... on white-owned farms being washed away by the rain. He became fond of the country, then run by Ian Smith’s white minority government in defiance of the rest of the world, including its former colonial master, Britain, and considers Smith’s Rhodesia a great agricultural success story. By that time the war between ...”

“... one faded. And then on my back I got a chick doing the limbo, going under the bar, with little black panties on. That one came out nice. Just before I got released, I was going to get a vampire. A guy had done a drawing of Dracula, and it was going to be on my right arm over my vein. The mouth would be open over the vein, and then when I fixed I could ...”

“... life. ‘The sale of five cattle is starting right now in ring number one,’ the voice said. A black heifer was padding around the ring, its hoofs slipping in sawdust and shit, and the man in charge of the gate, whose overalls were similarly caked, regularly patted it on the rump to keep it moving. Farmers in wellington boots and green waxed jackets hung ...”

“... he wanted someone to cook him his lunch.Over these years he met his literary heroes Hemingway, Ian Fleming and C.S. Forester, and tried, with the encouragement of Forester, to kick-start his own automatic grammatisator and sell stories to periodicals. In the short stories from the mid-1950s he got onto the marketable trick of embedding tropes from genre ...”

“... Johnson, who ran a series of newspaper ads that portrayed the tax as an attack on ‘the entire black community’: Unlike most white Americans, many African Americans who accumulated wealth did so facing race discrimination in education, employment, access to capital, and equal access to government resources. In many cases, race discrimination was ...”

“... the speakers do not listen to one another. Of the art of Ford’s friend and collaborator, Conrad, Ian Watt writes in his recent book on that writer’s 19th-century texts: ‘The need to derive moral meaning from physical sensation partly arises from the fact that both the impressionists and the symbolists ... proscribed any analysis, prejudgment, or ...”

“... about kings and queens is as voracious as ever. In the past couple of decades authors such as Ian Mortimer and Alison Weir have been bashing out books at a furious pace, including The Perfect King (yes, it was Edward III) and Queens of the Age of Chivalry. In the last few years, publishers have jumped on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, peddling titles such ...”

“... off the west of Ireland. A fair number of Scots manned the ship during the closing months of 1940: Ian Affleck used to work in Kalac’s Cycle and Motor Store in Forfar, and felt he’d been born to help power a ship such as this, named after his own town. Angus McInnes’s father had been a fisherman on the Isle of Harris; Angus had sailed with Forfar since ...”

“... was also a second song, a ghostly number about Saddleworth Moor and the murders of children by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, a song which seemed to bring place and personality together in a way that nobody had done in British pop before. Morrissey and Marr were a couple of arch-fans, a conglomeration of good influences and proper hungers, and their band, The ...”

“... handicap of six makes him superior to other obsessive literary golfers such as P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming, and only a little inferior to Malcolm Lowry and Patrick Hamilton, who were golfers as well as drinkers of championship class. This devotion to sport went with a declared aversion to women and, at this stage, to sex in any form. He told Carpenter in ...”

“... for their gaunt and bitter aspect, maimed and bemedalled, roll out a banner, bordered in black crêpe, Thiepval 1916 it reads. So comfortably remote, remoter even than the ‘relief of Derry’ [in 1689] they are celebrating. Silently, humorously, doggedly, they mass around a dripping platform, a remarkable feudal, patriarchal, tribal, historical ...”