“... US imperialism: now, in France, an ‘Americanised intelligentsia’, all ‘smiles, good teeth, nice hair’, is ‘the class that is most dangerous to the people’. Not that one must ask the people for their opinion of this, of course, for they will simply repeat what the intelligentsia, through the mass media, have told them. ‘In politics, spontaneous ...”

“... your life.’Powell began his career as a studio hand on silent films at the Victorine studios in Nice. He was ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’, as he put it, to Rex Ingram, a flamboyant Irish director known for making extravagant epics. Ingram’s Mare Nostrum (1926) was ‘a great film to come in on’, Powell wrote, ‘a spectacular film, full of enormous ...”

“... the last twenty years. Labour was well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. The Tory leader, David Cameron, was in a difficult phase, no longer a fresh figure after a year and a half in charge, and facing growing internal opposition to his liberalisation strategy. Brown, long regarded at Westminster and by the media as a ruthless operator, was widely ...”

“... through the gamuts for them all. And there was a martyred boy who stood in the bitter wind outside David Greig’s, his blue hands full of cracked eggs. For him I nursed an uplifting passion. I’m not sure that I didn’t rejoice in his suffering as a means to my salvation. Autobiography is an act of self-love, and Barker seems to have none. No more does she ...”

“... writing has a lyrical passion in argument that I found irresistible,’ says no less a judge than David Malouf. ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ Malouf being no fool, I am reluctant to suggest that the reason he couldn’t put the book down was that it is so full of hot air it kept springing back up again. Reluctant, but compelled. Lyrically passionate writing ...”

“... presented at the opening of the Andy Warhol Museum in April 1995. I’m sure everybody had a nice day out, but why must the speeches then be collected in this way? No good comes of it. Colin MacCabe tells us in his Preface that ‘it is not clear that Warhol’s prodigious output has ever been satisfactorily described, still less understood’ – which ...”

“... T.E. Lawrence); and nicely cheeky (of Churchill, ‘The old humbug can write’; Baden Powell, ‘nice old gentleman as he must be, is a ... Happiness-addict’). Within a short time he’d mastered all the tricks of the reviewer’s trade. He damns with faint praise (of Elsie Elizabeth Phare’s The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins he withers, ‘Miss Phare ...”

“... be accepted at the outset. Anyone – to be more specific, mountebanks like Daniel Goldhagen and David Cesarani – with not a lot to say, but with a will to dilate about atrocity, can extort a hearing for themselves. Others, with more to say, seem to have a clause in their contracts demanding that they mention it at least once in any article, be it on ...”

“... her off. She is said to have lived out the rest of her days as a comfortable Roman matron, on a nice estate near Tivoli. No asp for ...”

“... my arms just reaching her nose and my head resting comfortably on the top of the couch, with a nice view of the set. Perfect. She looks up at me and rolls her eyes. I give her a thumbs up. Then she spits green fluid into the half-moon receptacle. Achak doesn’t watch much TV in the refugee camps, but he goes to school, plays with his friends, obsesses ...”

“... Jamie (two), Gordon, Nigella, the clownish American TV chef Emeril Lagasse, Julia Child, Elizabeth David, Irma Rombauer (compiler of the American suburban kitchen bible, The Joy of Cooking), and even Delia. In the US, the cable TV Food Network reaches 85 million households, guaranteeing financial success for its stars’ books, videos and restaurants and ...”

“... ideally generates new headlines at least three or four times a day, especially when there is a nice fast-breaking scandal or moral panic to hammer away at. Politicians don’t feel that the press represents anyone apart from itself, and think it is arrogant and unaccountable, and the press feels the same things about the politicians, and both are right. As ...”

“... April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man’, and declared ‘the poor boy is all emphasis protestation and pose.’ By 1925 Graves had good reason to be ‘rattle headed’. He had survived Charterhouse school, which he hated. He got through by learning to box, by ...”

“... on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and ...”

“... for his own psychic traumas. In this reading Delany is following Brandt’s earlier critics, David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey, who identified in Brandt’s photographs coded expressions of his disturbed psyche. They contain what Delany identifies as ‘symbols and obsessions peculiar to himself’.Ever since Brandt became the focus of academic study in the ...”