“... As Songs of the Doomed so spectacularly illustrates, Doc’s the first American writer since John Dos Passos to tap the eroding and elemental fury within the American Dream and make the compost picture of American society in the last quarter of the 20th century work so elegantly on paper. I discovered two curious things about Doc’s writing when I was ...”

“... was guaranteed to increase its underground following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter ...”

“... its merchants, their wives, its virgins and, naturally, its mayor: He ys exempler, loodster and Guy [guide] Pryncypall patron, & Rose orygynall Above all mayrys, as mastyr most worthy – London thow art the flowyr of Cytees all. Dunbar has periodically been fingered as the Scottish priest. Not without reason – the poem has a rhyme scheme that he ...”

“... fashion, film, graphics and display have begun to dissolve. The ‘society of the spectacle’, as Guy Debord dubbed it in the Sixties, has engulfed every facet of visual communication. At the same time, the speed and scope of communication have intensified so that images of every type are disseminated much more rapidly, both within what remain of specific ...”

“... and dressed himself up as the respectable chairman. In Bill Gates, Small Brother, the average ugly guy coincides with and contains the figure of evil genius who aims for total control of our lives. In early James Bond movies, the evil genius was an eccentric figure, dressed extravagantly, or alternatively, in the grey uniform of the Maoist commissar. In the ...”

“... talking about,’ and hung up, Calley was stricken. ‘He knew … he was going to be the fall guy for the murders at My Lai,’ Hersh writes. Hersh’s first dispatch on My Lai focused on the army’s charge that Calley had killed 109 civilians. Life and Look magazines turned the piece down; Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books offered to ...”

“... the cinematography or the design.It was the beginning of the off-network TV tsunami that John Landgraf, the head of FX, calls peak TV. By 2022, he estimates that there were 559 scripted original shows on American television. HBO followed The Sopranos with Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Entourage, True Blood, Boardwalk ...”

“... the private sector sets aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, pioneered the popular benchmark of the NHS’s success or failure, the hip replacement operation. They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too ...”

“... pastoral balm akin to the American Scene Regionalist paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. ‘You hear those banjoes ringin’, darkies singin’’ Armstrong continues, the lyrics almost washed away by his majestic trumpet solo. The song looks worse, literally, in a 1935 movie short by trumpeter Red Nichols and His Five ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”

“... he complained in his diaries. ‘I’m sort of an inveterate autodidact, a do-it-yourself guy, a sort of Jules Verne.’ Guattari resented ‘being strapped onto Gilles’, and felt ‘overcoded’ by the ‘perfection that he brought to the most unlikely book’. What he really wanted to do was ‘say stupid shit. Barf out the ...”

“... He sieved biographies, letters and accounts of those he considered great men – whether John Adams or Confucius – to produce poems with distinct overtones of hero-worship. In politics this tendency led to his admiration for Mussolini, and even to that view of Hitler as ‘a Saint’. While caged in Pisa in the closing days of the war, he set to ...”

“... the more persistent, reliable, searching composite view of the man. Stevens was the ‘grindingest guy they had there in executive row’ at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company; in his letters he was precise but ‘only colourful when he was writing to some old friend’; he kept no photos of wife or daughter in his office. You read about his regularly ...”

“... The yoking of supposedly high and low aspects of life isn’t new, it’s there in Lawrence, and John Cowper Powys finds in it a sort of transgressive holiness, but here it represents no more than a reflex of disgust.Before the ceremony a grieving relative had insisted on the coffin being opened, motivated supposedly by ‘a Huisgenoot article she read last ...”

“... Europe’s ‘plan’ for us was like Hitler’s (Gove also used the Nazi analogy). Along with John Redwood – he of the velveteen disdain (‘That’s a very BBC question,’ he tells Kirsty Wark patronisingly) – Johnson has been a big proponent of the ‘prosecco and cheese’ argument: that the Italians and the French will be so scared of losing the ...”