“... mean its opposite, it’s a relief to listen to the introductory remarks of the Cinema Museum’s Martin Humphries. He swiftly redirects a pair of poverty tourists who want to experience the frisson of the workhouse and signs in the seven righteous persons who are up for a dose of bracing cinema evangelism. The museum collection was assembled for ‘beer ...”

“... to them: Catherine Opie and A.L. Steiner, Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy, Ryan Trecartin and Mike Kelley, Nao Bustamante and William Pope.L. Nelson spends less time on work that, in her view, is stupid, arrogant or exploitative. Names that come up in this context tend to be better known to mainstream audiences: Neil LaBute, Michael Haneke, Lars Von ...”

“... to form a third party. The other frontrunner, Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, is making inroads among his fellow creationists and millennialists, but has deviated from hardline Republican positions on taxes and immigration. The Republican implosion is long overdue. For more than forty years, the party fused together two ...”

“... He picked as a running mate buttoned-up patriarchy, the lean, crop-haired, perpetually tense Mike Pence, who actually has experience in government, signing eight anti-abortion bills in his four years as governor of Indiana, and going after Planned Parenthood the way Trump went after hapless beauty queens. The Republican platform was, as usual, keen to ...”

“... the March on Washington, the Watts uprising and Vietnam, the moon landing and the assassination of Martin Luther King; whose inspiration for Xenogenesis, her great biopolitical trilogy of the 1980s, was both the then recent revelation that scientists had stolen cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks’s body without her family’s knowledge, and Ronald Reagan’s ...”

“... ambition itself. An entire generation sniggered as fatuous Mr Robinson took the graduate aside, in Mike Nichols’s film, and whispered the one-word secret to success: ‘Plastics.’ However, Americans turned cynical in response to something much deeper than cultural style or youthful anomie. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared racial segregation ...”

“... had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of Hollywood ‘plagiarising’ European innovations and rendering them ‘banal’. For Kael, they rejuvenated what ...”

“... of statues reduced to pigeon roosts. In the middle of a voter registration drive in Atlanta, Martin Luther King Sr allowed the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, dressed as house slaves, to sing for a ball celebrating the 1939 première of Gone with the Wind. His ten-year-old son was dressed as a pickaninny. King was criticised by his fellow Baptist ...”

“... nation’s first ever ‘stand your ground’ gun law (the legislation that gave us the Trayvon Martin killing and countless other instances of unpunished citizen bloodletting); and prolonging the life of the severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo in a cynical bid to burnish his culture wars résumé. Also disgraceful was the disenfranchisement of Florida’s ...”

“... Keith have always been favoured by impersonators – from the 1970s TV fixtures Freddie Starr and Mike Yarwood ‘doing a Jagger’ to Stella Street and Pirates of the Caribbean – in a way the Beatles never were, perhaps because it always felt as if they were an indivisible four-headed entity. The sign outside the pub at the end of my road (which, before ...”

“... a whole took notice in 1959 when a black journalist, Louis Lomax, and a white television reporter, Mike Wallace, produced a five-part series on the Nation of Islam for New York City’s Channel 13, The Hate that Hate Produced. Nothing that hadn’t been said a hundred times before was included in the film clips of the Messenger, Malcolm and a fiery young ...”

“... on a chair made to look like an inverted, near-naked black woman, an image published on Martin Luther King Day. Abramovich, with his dislike of unnecessary publicity, was not amused. In the Branson household, it’s the man himself who can be relied on to do this sort of thing. The photo on the back of Bower’s book shows Branson sitting on the ...”

“... network Christ Church London. Members of the advisory board include the Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson; the failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who called the 6 January insurrection an ‘inside job’; the former Australian prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott; the Blue Labour founder, Maurice Glasman, who attended ...”

“... seek button – derangingly – every two or three seconds. Burbly soft rock, stale oldies, Dean Martin singing Christmas carols, Mexican polka music, endless mirthless ads for Petco and Wal-Mart – the full auditory wasteland of American popular culture assailed us. Shades of when we used to be girlfriends. We bickered most of the rest of the way. By the ...”

“... Waterstone’s gala dinner. The first speaker is Henry Cooper. He says something relevant, apropos Mike Tyson: ‘when someone goes arahnd bitin’ people’s ears off and punchin’ refs, that only tells me one fing: ‘e doesn’t want to be in the ring.’ Precisely. Cooper’s other good remark, about the desperately low quality of opponents for Audley ...”