“... showings. Not unlike Les Diaboliques (which was quite as disturbing) in several ways, Psycho was a black and white, low-budget horror movie which for cheapness – in both senses – was filmed by a television crew, while being directed by the A-listed Alfred Hitchcock, by then responsible for huge and glossy Hollywood hits like Rebecca, To Catch a Thief and ...”

“... Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s young Irish-American co-worker at MIT, Margot O’Toole, and the 17 pages of laboratory entries she decided to copy from a colleague’s notebook – just in case an accusation of criminal ...”

“... is constantly getting under the feet of Darmon the historian. The moralist sees everything in black and white (mainly black). He praises occasional ‘liberal’ attitudes but condemns what he calls – in defiance of his own chronology – ‘iniquitous Medieval severity’. Among his favourite adjectives, or his ...”

“... Scotland Act. But how many London papers noticed that the new SNP government has quietly appointed Linda Fabiani minister for Europe and external affairs?) The fact is that global warming will make Greenland independent. This is a slightly embarrassing discovery for the Greenlanders, who have instinctive sympathy for the ecowarriors in the rest of the world ...”

“... and isoniazid – was, on balance, harmful. The best that sanatoria such as Nordrach in the Black Forest and its British imitators, Nordrach-on-Mendip in Somerset and Nordrach-on-Dee in Aberdeenshire, did was to prevent their sequestered inmates from coughing bacilli over the public at large. The Edinburgh system of ‘zomotherapy’, the eating of raw ...”

“... a slightly elevated version of what critics have for centuries viewed as the ‘lady copyist’.Linda Nochlin’s​ essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971) was written partly out of a desire to deal with this issue of women artists as dilettantes. She concluded that no manipulation of the evidence or discovery of more ‘modest if ...”

“... and also Bob Wootton, the replacement guitarist for Luther Perkins and the driver of Cash’s big black tour bus, in which he criss-crossed America, playing stadiums and theatres and festivals and just about anywhere that would have him, week in, week out, year in, year out. Cash laboured hard for his help; he’d come a long way for a share-cropper’s son ...”

“... own. They are exclusively political appointees; they are, as a group, notably illiberal – anti-black and anti-semitic feeling is not uncommon and women are still often shamefully treated by many judges; and they are more executive-minded than any other judiciary this side of the Iron Curtain. They also tend to invent (or disregard) laws when they want ...”

“... first time Vanessa sneaks out of her dorm to spend the night with him, she takes along a black satin nightie she has stolen from her mother’s drawer, but Strane has bought her a pyjama set with strawberries on, which she wears to please him. He lives in a clean and spartan house that he stocks with crisps, ice cream and Cherry Coke. Kate Elizabeth ...”

“... the head of a young Scotsman pivoted front to back, a rather less impressive circuit than that of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. One woman vomited a live eel, followed by 24 pounds of various substances twice a day for two weeks. (With admirable judiciousness, Brian Levack, the author of The Devil Within, warns that ‘the veracity of such reports can be ...”

“... in the wake of her illness. She moved from Brooklyn to Iowa to be near her childhood friend Linda, and Linda’s husband, Wayne, who along with her daughters provided the care that saw her through her terminal diagnosis and final van ride to Dr Kevorkian’s house in Michigan.Presumably Hoeflich either told Beard ...”

“... lord chancellor could perform, and Lord Falconer, wearing a morning coat instead of the splendid black and gold robe, was sworn in as a nightwatchman lord chancellor. The joke went round Whitehall that the legislation enshrining the new dispensation was to consist of a single clause giving press releases from Number Ten the status of primary ...”

“... a representation of dangerously unfettered female sexuality; whereas Vicki (no last name needed), black forelady of the Swede’s glove factory, with her dutiful subservience to her boss – she ‘would not desert him. She told him: “This is mine too. You just own it”’ – saves his factory from the Newark riots of July 1967. In the Swede’s last ...”

“... are everything to them. It is gross, but also comically inept: ‘I look in the mirror. Silvered black hair; gray lizardskin shoes’ – it’s a jigsaw of a Whistler speaking, not a person! Once he has put the pieces together, they proclaim: I am, like my mother, a broad-shouldered, slim-waisted woman with strong thighs; neither small-breasted nor ...”

“... White to White features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg never published on the relatively ...”