“... together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.’ Stryker stood at the podium wearing what she calls ‘genderfuck drag’: combat boots, threadbare Levi 501s over a black lace bodysuit, a shredded Transgender Nation T-shirt with the neck and sleeves cut out, a pink triangle, quartz crystal pendant, grunge metal jewellery, and a six inch ...”

“... response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and scandal (Buñuel, for instance, tentatively ...”

“... refuser (1853). Perhaps the two portrayals are not coincidental. In 1851, the Melville family read David Copperfield aloud as their evening entertainment. The pre-20th-century office worker saw himself as a cut above the unsalaried labouring masses, and was as ambivalent about his superiors, who were his only means of rising, as the rest of the working world ...”

“... in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her as their ‘most underrated author’ in the TLS and she was taken up in a flurry of publicity, interviewed on radio and TV. Quartet in Autumn, the novel she had on the stocks, was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker prize and new ...”

“... memories of 6 January were at any risk of fading, they were rekindled on 28 October, when David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer after breaking into their home in San Francisco (she subsequently announced she was standing down as Speaker). DePape shook Pelosi awake with cries of ‘Where’s ...”

“... expound her work through her own body: eternally ‘an athlete of God’, as she herself says; a David before the Ark. Graham’s own book, finished just before she died and burdened with a reluctant acceptance of mortality in its last pages, nevertheless begins briskly: ‘I am a dancer.’ She knew she still was, although she gave her last performance in ...”

“... civility – attended by men and women anxious to ‘improve’ – rather than of vice. He begged David Garrick to cancel a revival of The Beggar’s Opera at Drury Lane on the grounds that it inflamed young men with the ambition to be highwaymen, and sent, ‘every time it is acted, one additional thief to the gallows’. These efforts did ...”

“... galling. She had no compunction in announcing to a roomful of strangers that one of her guests was wearing an ‘awful hat’ or reducing a pregnant daughter-in-law to tears by asking: ‘Where have you come from? The gutter?’ On the political trail, however, her rhinoceros skin was a virtue. She seemed to relish hecklers. ‘Now, you Bolsheviks at the ...”

“... Market, he knocked at the door of a little house at Causewayend. It was opened by a woman wearing an apron. Sensing her imminent retreat, Henderson quickly broke into a verse of ‘The Battle of Harlaw’, prompting Jeannie Robertson to let him in so that she might teach him to sing it properly. Scotland’s travelling clans were widely despised and ...”

“... It was the moment, in the mid-1950s, when worlds were beginning to collide. Tennant’s uncle David ran the louche but artistic Gargoyle Club in Soho, where the old aristocracy mixed with the new celebrity. Princess Margaret met Lucian Freud and Ian Fleming; Tennant’s previous girlfriend, Ivy Nicholson, became part of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Jeanne ...”

“... more you are doing, the less you know the more you are knowing, the less you wear the more you are wearing, and so say all of us. God loves a chancer more than he loves a trier, and the tabloid newspapers – who recognise no higher power than themselves – speak every day for a Britain that is perfectly in love with its cellphone democracy. This is William ...”

“... on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan is a close up of its subject inhaling, eyes shut, fingers splayed; its back cover, three shots of him in different stages of smoking – an action-sequence of sorts. How ...”

“... Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David Bowie; this must mean something. But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy.No, I was not the right reader, then, for I am more certain of the parameters of mysticism than philosophy, at least as it is practised by those who ...”

“... smell. Every member of a parade which by 11 a.m. will stretch through the middle of the town is wearing a large sprig of rosemary. (That, courtesy of Ophelia, is for remembrance, though the scent seems less funereal than paschal.) Most celebrants are also carrying substantial mixed bouquets – in the economic life of Stratford’s florists, Shakespeare is ...”

“... was somehow much more sympathetic than it sounds when recorded in cold print. But it was wearing to live with, not least for himself.Why was Sassoon like this? In the public mind he remained not only one of the most celebrated poets of the Great War but also an abiding emblem of courage and protest against the carnage. He remained a legend you were ...”