“... strictly for the English, like Arnold’s Celticism – but not the patriotic ballads of Thomas Davis. Those who are truly purist about Irish traditional music, including a number of Northern Protestants, deplore both. The processing of contemporary Northern Ireland is a more delicate matter than yet another inquest on the Irish Literary Revival, although ...”

“... trade at its worst. Even the device of undergirding, or frapping, popularised by the apostle Paul when in trouble off Crete, was still in use – running cables under the keel and tightening them to hold the hull together. The decrepit 74-gun Blenheim was so ‘wretchedly hogged’ that the builders strongly remonstrated against her putting to ...”

“... but in the economic or cultural heartland of the global American imperium. Except for Jane and Paul Bowles in Morocco, only Robert Stone and Joan Didion suggest themselves, and neither of them is associated closely with any one setting. On the whole, American writers seem convinced that the vital features of their society are most clearly discernible at ...”

“... Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None ...”

“... the magical castle jail, with its high turrets and gothic battlements’. ‘There is a story,’ Paul Rock writes in Reconstructing a Women’s Prison (1996), ‘that its façade [was intended] … to mollify suburban neighbours unhappy about the construction of a prison in the midst of their new-built homes.’ When an execution took place, crowds would ...”

“... for the quasi-religious practices – ritual, ceremony, confession – that it had adopted. Angela Davis criticised ‘the relegation of race to matters of the heart’. For radical critics, the new anti-racism is suspiciously neoliberal, conforming to Anne McClintock’s description of liberalism as ‘the promise of social resolution through individual ...”

“... Martin trace the origins, rise and decline of a mostly misunderstood political movement. Angela Davis, who was an ally of the Panthers and a member of the Communist Party, complains that she is better remembered as a 1970s fashion icon, known for her large Afro, than for the depth of her political commitment: It is both humiliating and humbling to discover ...”

“... in Cactus Flower and Applause, a musical adaptation of All about Eve. Bacall took the Bette Davis role, and won a Tony. A decade later she won another one for the musical Woman of the Year. By then she was a New York fixture, living in a magnificent apartment in the Dakota building at 72nd Street and Central Park West. There had been another ...”

“... Pacific, and perhaps beyond. In 1588 Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado sailed, or said he had sailed, from Davis Strait, north of Hudson Bay, into the fabled Strait of Anian that opened into the Pacific Ocean. These reports were later supported by Willem Schouten and Abel Tasman in the South Seas, and Juan de Fuca and Bartolomeo de Fonte in the Northwest. On these ...”

“... extreme length of Castro’s speeches is a puzzle. He compulsively worked them over. Angela Davis remembers him telling her that he used to get nervous before delivering them. Part of it may have been to do with the methodical patience he learned during his two years in the mountain fastness of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who ...”

“... following in the footsteps of Norman Douglas and accompanied by her admirer and mentor Irving Davis. When Davis’s stepdaughter joined them she objected to the children’s presence and so unworried was Gray about them that she gave them £20 and told them to hitchhike back to London. It took them three weeks and when ...”

“... While Hopper was still in his twenties, and noisily convinced that he was a better actor than Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward concluded (some time after hitting him on the head at a party with an antique copper bedwarmer): ‘Dennis is a genius. I’m not sure of what, and I’m not sure Dennis knows of what. Certainly not acting. But he is a genius.’ It ...”

“... time, long ago, when one thing the very rich and very famous could be relied on to do was shut up. Paul Getty, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Grace of Monaco wrapped their money around themselves in the form of impenetrable walls and/or designer sunglasses and kept silent while the world wondered and chattered. And you would imagine that if money could ...”

“... architect modelling the relationship of ‘Hans Pfitzner or Richard Strauss, or Furtwängler, or Paul Hindemith to a patron resembling Goebbels’. He suggests that Prince’s early poetic experiments were ‘influenced by the styles of political, economic and literary criticism as these were presented – or, as some would say, paraded – in the pages of ...”

“... Dustan afterwards make his books not so much a glorification of bareback sex but, as Oliver Davis has pointed out, a literary representation of an epidemiological reality. ‘If I stay [in the Marais] I’m going to die,’ Dustan writes. ‘I’m going to end up putting sperm in everyone’s ass and everyone is going to end up doing the same to me ...”