“... programme on which two antagonists duke it out, each with her very own hostile interviewer; as a friend remarked, it’s like being locked in a room with your own rabid dog. I debated Hillary Johnson, whose book Osler’s Web, argues that the Government has tried to cover up the world pandemic of chronic fatigue syndrome. Despite the gibes of my ...”

“... the trial). He was acquitted of all offences.While the women’s reputations were being trashed, a friend sent me a passage from The Other Wind, the final instalment in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle. ‘“How men feared women!” she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. “Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked ...”

“... decisions, and even the most important people have their price. The price for Bert Lance, a close friend of President Carter, and briefly a member of Carter’s Administration, was obvious. Poor Bert had got into trouble with his own bank at home in Georgia and owed about three million dollars. Abedi lent him the three million. It was never repaid of ...”

“... try to achieve what we wish for. The disjunction between what I want and what I can have is my friend, my best friend in all likelihood, and I know it. Disappointment is a safety net to be relished in a secret, knowing way by the disappointed. Give thanks for the BAS and all the other preventers of fantasy come true.The ...”

“... the other way while her husband cavorted. ‘Sometimes,’ she writes, ‘when Lee or another friend visited the private quarters of the White House, Jackie would pull out that old photo . . . and howl with laughter until tears ran down her cheeks.’ When Maisie grew up, she would have understood. Sir Claude, Maisie’s rescuing stepfather, came to ...”

“... racist folk art, as the blackface performances of Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Amos ‘n’ Andy and their fellows flash across the screen, Bamboozled exposes the burnt-cork roots of contemporary American entertainment. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times responded with illustrated features dismissing Bamboozled and celebrating the Mammy ...”

“... I started listening.I didn’t know that day that she was a new mother, that Cobain was her dear friend, or what it’s like to be in the rhythm section, how much she was keeping it all together up there. Since 1981, in New York City, Sonic Youth had been turning rock music into untamed sound and back again, and bringing this experimental work to a ...”

“... is close to what really happened, though there wasn’t a collective, just Meadow inviting her old friend Carrie Wexler on a visit to see the footage of trains she had shot with equipment paid for by her father. This was the mid-1980s, early days for the sort of on-the-fly filmmaking, done solo, that can now be taken for granted, but was then still far from ...”

“... with his Dobermans, a fairy godfather – of the kind that used to be seen as the immigrant’s friend – and in Marius’s time, too, there were indications, sounds and airs, that the black magic of the Mafia was known to the island. Paul Castellano was a Staten Island householder who can rarely have set foot on the ferry and who was eventually to stay at ...”

“... accompanied Duchamp to his first retrospective in Pasadena, California, where Hamilton met Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg (who became a good friend); in 1966 he collaborated on another Duchamp survey, at the Tate, the centrepiece of which was his own painstaking reconstruction of The Large Glass (the fragile ...”

“... leading production companies – Nek Video Link, O.J. Productions, Infinity Merchant, Contec, Andy Best and Amaco – are all based in Onitsha, the market town on the banks of the River Niger that spawned the equally popular phenomenon known as ‘Onitsha market literature’, which flourished from the late 1940s until the outbreak of the civil war in ...”

“... Kate, ‘and that led to all kinds of trouble academically and emotionally.’ In a letter to a friend from 1966, reproduced in Richard King’s new oral biography, Travels over Feeling, the 15-year-old Russell is already referring to Walt Whitman, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg (prefiguring later, more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and ...”

“... new medieval future’, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Often Burn’s book reads like an Andy Warhol-style celebration of the new, shiny mediated reality. As he lists the football shirts worn by famously murdered children, Burn sounds almost religious. The news seems to be acting out what Mailer called ‘the dream life of the nation’. This book ...”

“... all there, looking in many respects a little more with it and a whole lot more luminous than his friend Snoop Dogg, popping and krumping beside him. The performance was met with amazement by the audience, and then 2Pac was gone in one of those puffs of smoke that are always more fun in pantomime than they are in real life, curling from the muzzle of a ...”

“... subject. Disney was the 20th century’s corporate artist supreme, the original multimedia genius, Andy Warhol avant la lettre, Elvis Presley’s only rival as the most important figure in American mass culture. Besides, as Leslie is well aware, the cartoons on which Disney built his Magic Kingdom have never seemed more central to the history of motion ...”