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“... and is fond of dressing up in other people’s personalities. After the Almighty, after St Paul – for whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature ...”

“... Weiner a rather bland politician: a striver and a party hack, another jockish pretty boy, a Paul Ryan of the centre left. In the 1980s, just out of college, where he played hockey (still does, every Monday night), Weiner rose through the office of then Congressman Charles Schumer (now known as ‘Wall Street’s senator’), and was elected New York’s ...”

“... are snitches. What did the local liquor store owner in Woody Creek, Colorado, know about Hunter Thompson? The make of his car and that he was going to appear on the Today show. The main snitch in Ray Bradbury’s file was the actor and screenwriter Martin Berkeley, a former Communist Party member who gave around 160 names to the House Committee on ...”

“... by the sea striking her astern or amidships?’ That was one of the easier ones. When Captain Thompson – ‘motionless, remote and enigmatical’ – piled on the agony with fog, a lee-shore and a lost anchor cable, Conrad explained that he would ‘back the bow anchor and tail the heaviest hawser on board on the end of the chain before letting go, and ...”

“... a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore Sottsass, ‘Neal Cassady, Los Gatos, California’ (1962) Bernard ...”

“... is there to be made use of, and everyone makes use of it in his own way. Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson invent alternative Englands where radical social experiments were nipped in the bud by the entrenched forces of reaction, while T.S. Eliot’s successors imagine devout cavaliers preserving a unified sensibility in economic and spiritual matters. Apart ...”

“... evidence of stupidity on hand – and none more eye-catching than that left behind him by ‘Thompson of Sunderland’, a vandal out of the North who had scrawled his name and address on Pompey’s column in Alexandria in letters that Flaubert claims could be read ‘a quarter of a league away’. More significantly stupid than ...”

“... to end up feeling that she has a point. The critical approach she has in mind is a form of what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion. On this view, the task of critique is to dig out hidden meanings and concealed contradictions in a text, scanning it for those symptomatic points at which it falters, deadlocks, disrupts its own logic or threatens ...”

“... manufactured look. (He had, in fact, changed it by deed poll from William Guinneach Gunn to Thompson William Gunn – Thompson was his mother’s maiden name.) It was clear, too, that he enjoyed his own style, his wit, his urge to dismiss what was dull and cautious, to celebrate what was dangerous and alive. This was ...”

“... this because it never looked at the origin of the nuclear weapons phenomenon in the first place. Paul Mercer correctly notes the way CND has waxed and waned as new generations of nuclear weaponry, especially American, have appeared in Britain. He does not draw the interesting comparison between this country and France, where there is no ‘peace ...”

“... to the structure and to the theme of Stolen Lightning. This is not a book that describes magic – Paul Daniels and his friends in the Magic Circle can rest easy. Instead, it is a book that celebrates a kind of magic, the magical arcana of high social science. As the author frequently points out, modern sociology and anthropology have been dominated by the ...”

“... with the paper’s backers, and recent research seems to show him in no very creditable light. Paul Addison begins a commentary on Churchill’s career before 1914 by noting that it ‘depended in many respects on his relations with the urban working class’. His first constituency was Oldham. He was capable in those days, as Clarke reminds us, of ...”

“... plain to downright ugly, if you don’t count Glen Ford or Dana Andrews (who weren’t exactly Paul Newman or Montgomery Clift themselves). My generation have Cahiers du cinéma, Godard and Truffaut to thank for the earlier generation of movie stars we might have overlooked. More fundamentally, we have to thank Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who ...”

“... can detect echoes of his jaundiced vision in Jordan Peele’s recent horror film, Get Out, and in Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout. But, as if it were his destiny to remain just beyond the pale of literary approval, Himes, unlike Baldwin, flunks the contemporary ‘woke’ test. As much as he deplored the prejudices of the black bourgeoisie and aligned ...”

“... in his twice-daily War Room. Bannon took it as a ‘badge of honour’, according to Stuart Thompson of the New York Times, when the Brookings Institution declared his talk show misinformation superspreader number one. ‘How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Views?’ Klein asks. ‘If volume is the name of the game, these crossover ...”