“... made Lydon sound like a drowning man one minute, a Smurf the next. ‘The idea,’ according to Keith Levene, PiL’s brittle-looking and sounding guitarist, ‘was to break through conditioning.’ The following year, they produced a second album, Metal Box. It came packaged as a circular film canister, stamped with the PiL logo and just wider than a ...”

“... knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite.’) Brian Jones played the album for Keith Richards, who thought he was listening to two guitarists. (‘It took me a long time to realise he was actually doing it all by himself,’ Richards said.) The Rolling Stones used Johnson’s songs to convey melancholy and stasis (‘Love in Vain’ on Let ...”

“... but Cecelia’s theory, reported years later by Queeney, by then happily married to Baron Keith of Stonehaven Marischal, Admiral of the North Sea Fleet, was that ‘it was from original and persevering dislike and real hatred of us all, from her hatred of our father, and certainly her general conduct to the whole family strongly savours of that ...”

“... you ever get bored, my dear, we can always change it. You can change them yourself.’He liked speed. ‘It’s hard to see how Warhol could have managed without some chemical help in those early days,’ Gopnik writes, ‘what with his double workload of ads and fine art plus a madcap social and cultural life.’ Warhol’s friend and lover John Giorno ...”

“... effect a stealthy return to Hirst’s pre-occupation with the body and with disease and death. Keith Coventry’s white on white tribute to Malevich conceals portraits, painted in slightly different shades of white, representing Sir Norman Reid, (former) director of the Tate, and the Queen, to whom he is allegedly explaining modern art. At the other end of ...”

“... their rivals. The result is extraordinary and often depressing. ‘Unexpected disasters,’ Keith Thomas wrote in Religion and the Decline of Magic, ‘the sudden death of a child, the loss of a cow, the failure of some routine household task – all could, in default of any more obvious explanation, be attributed to the influence of some malevolent ...”

“... as an antidote to angst. When skating on thin ice, Springsteen discovered, his only safety lay in speed; touring lent the momentum and adulation took the place of love. ‘The show provided me the illusion of intimacy without risk or consequences.’ Before Scialfa whipped him into shape as a partner and parent, his early unexamined behaviour was a page from ...”

“... known in London called John Reid. They decided that, once home, they should move in together. The speed with which this was decided became part of a pattern. ‘Later, when I was really famous, this became a terrible problem both for me and the object of my affection. I’d insist they give up their own lives in order to follow me around on tour, with ...”

“... into the beliefs of those persecuted as witches – Trevor-Roper in the first instance, but also Keith Thomas, charged with reductionism and functionalism. Against this tradition Ginzburg sets what he sees as the superior programme of Lévi-Strauss’s Structuralist treatment of myths as symbolic systems, whose hidden meaning is generated by unconscious ...”

“... the fission explosion. Since X-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation they travel at the speed of light and thus can in principle implode and ignite the thermonuclear fuel before the shock wave from the primary stage blows it apart. This process is known as radiation implosion; and according to normal US nomenclature, a ‘hydrogen’ or ...”

“... he got a sound it would take the Rolling Stones until 1972’s Exile on Main Street to secure. And Keith Richards says he still can’t work out some of Moore’s blistering riffs and runs.) Listening to these itchy little songs in your front room, sixty years on, you miss the most vital spark in the detonation: Elvis’s own vivid, mercurial presence. His ...”

“... so did his burial on the island of Skyros, where Achilles lived and Theseus was killed; so did the speed with which his death followed on the publication of his five war sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already ...”

“... outside Oxford. And when, in the last movement of the book, Hubert’s father takes him by high-speed viaducted inter-continental railroad to Rome, we stare (like other tourists) at a completely re-architected re-sculptured St Peter’s and Vatican. Simultaneously, satire accompanies romance; the personalities of our own world flicker in and out in roles ...”

“... thirty years will know, the Roth-Bloom marriage turned into ‘quite a debacle’, to quote Brian Keith from Reflections in a Golden Eye. No need to recap the blow by blow, available for your gruesome reading pleasure not only in the partisan Leaving a Doll’s House, Bailey’s semi-partisan account here, and chapters nine and ten of Nadel’s more ...”

“... found it necessary to have a chauffeur, and then there was a succession of chauffeurs. One, named Keith, had a spidery handwriting in which he wrote out the weekly accounts of petrol and the hours he had worked, and my father, misreading his name, called him ‘Heath’. It was a sign of the times, either of the prevalence of respect, or of the scarcity of ...”