“... world, he reminisces about the journey he made, the spillage from life into artefact: black and white photographs, home-movie footage, drawings by Eden, letters from friends. And bushels of porn. The outer chamber is stacked with tastefully framed images of pink people doing pink things; limited scenarios enacted, with limited enthusiasm, in budget hotel ...”

“... the city’s deadly riots in 1965 and 1992; the formative years spent in southern California by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the region’s postwar conservative movement, which greatly influenced their presidencies; and last year’s protests over policing and racism, which were among the largest in the US. The rest of the time, you might ...”

“... kind of clothing that will make you look poverty stricken.’ She wrote about meeting the actor Richard Pryor, who in the course of their interviewbought a gold necklace … for the woman he had introduced as his girlfriend … a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet … wrote a cheque for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller ...”

“... reflect awareness of their condition as women and as women writers ... present-day, middle-class white women must win their place in competition with many others, by virtue of high literary ambition, or creative excellence, or feminist perception, or energetic output, or high profile.’ Jacqueline Susann is listed in The Guinness Book of Records as author ...”

“... circumvented the King-quota limit by bringing out five surplus horror tales under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’. Unfortunately the Bachman books’ disguise was eventually penetrated. But, more significantly, their appeal was drastically altered when their true authorship was publicised. As King observed, Thinner sold 28,000 by ...”

“... has its quota of resident yogins, astrologers and cabalists. Guidebooks to these regions abound. Richard Cavendish in The Magical Arts makes an ambitious survey of the whole field – numerology, the Cabala, alchemy, astrology – and then, crossing the boundary between the dubiously permissible and the outright dangerous, goes on to ritual magic designed to ...”

“... career as the avatar of the good and the not-so-good, still travelling in the wake of Little Richard. The history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the ...”

“... fought alongside large numbers of indigenous Indians and Southern blacks who viewed the local white settlers and slave-owners as being more dangerous than the imperial authorities in London. Such clashes but also collaborations between different peoples are surely what make imperial history (and we ideally need another name for it) such a compelling and ...”

“... to inspect a sperm whale’s penis? This is one of the many intrepid expeditions undertaken by Richard King in the course of researching Ahab’s Rolling Sea. His book, like Moby-Dick itself, tells you everything you ever wanted to know about whales but were too ashamed to ask. The fact that the sperm whale’s penis, or ‘grandissimus’, is four and a ...”

“... be seen.’Some special forces memoirs have been so popular they have led to pulp franchises. Richard Marcinko, the first commander of SEAL Team Six, later convicted of defrauding the US government, published his bestselling memoir, Rogue Warrior, in 1992 and followed it with more than a dozen thrillers fictionalising various SEAL missions. Eric ...”

“... told Dower that his book on the occupation of Japan was reported to be required reading in the White House. Small comfort this must have been; no one in power then or later showed the slightest inclination to think seriously about what might be learned from past experience. For the US, Iraq very quickly became the sort of tactical success and strategic ...”

“... on they’ll be hard to stop. The Tate’s is the kind of show that sets one generalising. Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, wrote that it had managed ‘to take a non-subject (Picasso’s impact here was limited to a handful of artists) and turn it into a gripping indictment of British culture in the first half of the 20th ...”

“... and the fairy queen echo the extravagant and often sly fairytales – ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘The White Cat’ – that were being retrieved and written down in France by Charles Perrault and Mme d’Aulnoy in the 1690s. D’Aulnoy did, however, claim that her inspiration came to her from ‘une vieille esclave arabe’.So the story of The Arabian Nights is a ...”

“... journalists, many of whom are women nowadays, are quite as likely to ask for a Perrier water or a white wine and soda as to order a large scotch or a pint of bitter. In some respects, this is no less important a change in the ambience of our trade than the new technology and the mass migration from Fleet Street. Moreover, the combination of these factors has ...”

“... unnaturally large, with their heads reaching nearly up to the ceiling, as the British sculptor Richard Deacon showed us in photographs of visitors to the labyrinth of tiny tunnels which run under the city of Chicago. The tunnel becomes claustrophobic, oppressive, odd. On the other hand, if the tunnel is very large, it becomes ...”