“... sentiments began to seep into the American public sphere no sooner than the rubble of the Berlin Wall had been tidied away.In hindsight, four figures in particular stand out: Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard and Ross Perot. Francis was, and remains, a comparatively obscure figure in American conservative intellectual and journalistic circles. But ...”

“... printer engines for Chinese characters, through all the ups and downs (colleagues being poached by Wall Street firms, interdepartmental rivalries, power failures in Beijing), to the Kasparov/IBM showdown. A particular low point was a Spectator article claiming that the computer chess project was a front sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects ...”

“... did not join? How different were their expectations and attitudes? Until the fall of the Berlin Wall these questions were asked and answered chiefly by impassioned anti-Communists, many of them breast-beating former devotees of the God That Failed. With some notable exceptions – Annie Kriegel was one – they wrote works of condemnation, warning and fear ...”

“... or self-abasement, and if you didn’t answer the bloody phone she would just ring it off the wall. Harry’s voice was not big, not powerful, but she taught herself to use it with tremendous precision: Chapman hadn’t realised, he said, that she’d planned to do a little-girl lullaby number on ‘Heart of Glass’. A voice like that, in the ...”

“... ever have those dreams that are just completely real?’ In the opening scene of Slacker (1990), Richard Linklater, who also directs the film, plays a version of himself, peppering his monologue on the nature of reality with references to Tolstoy, Frank Zappa and The Wizard of Oz. The movie takes place over a single day in Austin and follows a string of ...”

“... seems to amount to a solid confirmation of the Blood for Oil argument: the Iraq invasion was, the Wall Street Journal said, ‘one of the most audacious hostile takeovers ever’. Perhaps, but the argument is multi-layered and sometimes inconsistent. Blood for Oil could mean that the war was a response to oil shortage, or to machinations by the ...”

“... from his script. It begins: ‘A pale grey light coming from two sash windows that cut into a dark wall. We see the rain falling through the windows and reflecting on the ceiling, and the shadows of passing cars.’ He continued reading until Delon stopped him. ‘You’ve been reading for seven and a half minutes, and there’s not yet a shadow of ...”

“... Last Duchess’ begins, with a fine surprising immediacy:That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,Looking as if she were alive. I callThat piece a wonder, now ...– the 16th-century Duke of Ferrara speaking with a flamboyant strength that Thurber’s capitals echo at a distance; and the Duke, too, ends by introducing a second wife in circumstances felt ...”

“... than with a woman’. By early November, about the time Kennedy was squeaking out a victory over Richard Nixon, Ann became pregnant. She was still a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday. They were secretly married on 2 February 1961 in Maui, but it is unclear how long they actually lived together. Scott reports that Ann’s friends suspected she knew early on ...”

“... parts of the city, you can see it with your own eyes. Beyond the first cotton fields, the American Wall bars the horizon, a reminder that something does lie beyond all this misery, but something inaccessible. You leave the main road and make your way, joltingly, to Riberas del Bravo, a neighbourhood (or colonia) created by Infonavit, the great state housing ...”

“... a Mod, a hippy and a Buddhist; he’d called himself Davie Jones, David Jay and David Bowie (after Richard Widmark’s portrayal of Jim Bowie in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the first syllable rhyming with ‘snow’ rather than ‘shoe’ or ‘cow’). Whatever it took. One of the things Trynka’s biography makes clear is ...”

“... more munificently than King ever did. 16 February: Man on the phone opposite takes a piss by the wall, talking throughout. I wonder whether he tells the person he is talking to that he’s currently having a piss and, if it’s a woman, if this is some sort of come-on. 28 February. Spike Milligan dies and the nation’s laughter-makers queue up to testify to ...”

“... by three men in nearby Adler Street. A photograph from the period shows a swastika scrawled on a wall above the message ‘We’re back.’ Today a park on Whitechapel Road is named after Altab Ali. It’s a prime site for a rally. Earlier this year it was packed with teenage Muslim girls who had skived off school to shout obscenities about Blair’s ...”

“... then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one ...”

“... 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him’.In 1934, a year before his death, Pessoa began a ...”