“... would do well not to ask any questions about motivation. On Carla’s Song, he gave the actor Robert Carlyle a run-down of his character. ‘Your name’s George and you drive a bus. Maybe it would be a good idea if you learned to drive a bus.’ Had Loach stuck with theatre directing – an early pursuit – he would by now be bringing his plays to ...”

“... Pasadena Art Museum in 1963, the other at the Tate Gallery in 1966. The Pasadena opening attracted young Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha, who claimed Duchamp as a patron saint. Another Pop figure, Richard Hamilton, who accompanied Duchamp to California, devoted a few years to a reconstruction of The Large Glass for the Tate show; he also ...”

“... as he needed to be, and he had described Stephen in a book title as a portrait of himself when young: he would not trivialise the character without warning, in a continuation. Actually, the book confronts Stephen with a grim necessity: for a time at least, he must commit himself to becoming a concert singer, a companionable life, but one from which the ...”

“... in the view of ACLEFEU, offers a surer route out of poverty than riot and affray, and will stand young men in better stead than their combustion spree in the winter of 2005, prompted by the death of two teenagers electrocuted in Clichy-sous-Bois as they hid from the police in an EDF substation. The 2007 presidential election – the first round is on 22 ...”

“... Both versions have the allusion I have just spotted to the song ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life’ by Young and Herbert (from Naughty Marietta). ‘At last I’ve found thee,’ the line continues, picking up the idea of finding pain when paradise is lost, or has lost us. ‘Mistery’ suggests missing mastery as well as what we don’t know. Another ...”

“... valuable aspect of the Oxford volumes, whose examples range from the minuscule (Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Focus, a ‘private magazine, for and by friends’, or Georges Bataille’s Acéphale, the house organ of his eponymous secret society) to the massive (Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, with circulations in 1930 of 90,000 and 100,000 ...”

“... into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same city, San Francisco, forge an alliance of mutual misunderstanding through a love of words and thirst for fame. The celebrated episode that triggered the telegram took place on 7 October 1955 in the cramped ...”

“... well as on celluloid, he charmed everyone who met him, from Kaiser Wilhelm II, who considered the young diplomat’s exquisite manners and refined intelligence ‘the perfect pattern of an eminent prelate of the Catholic Church’, to D’arcy Osborne, the British government’s representative in Rome during World War Two, who, though often critical of ...”

“... Gigolo, its designer brand and body worship dream state, the cipher-ish splendour of studly young Richard Gere, and its ‘acid vision of Los Angeles as a brightly coloured wasteland’. I would also recommend the brief chapter entitled ‘Post-Empire’, with its neat division of Empire and post-Empire (from an American perspective, natch). ‘If ...”

“... toward sex but from the European assumption (found lingering in the work of Americans like Robert Altman) that the scent of documentary can and should be allowed to flavour a fictional method.’ Lane is thinking of American cinema as Hollywood. But there is a strong tradition of American documentary, from ...”

“... men, courtiers, emperors, bores, Margaret Thatcher, fools, bad poets, frocks, personal enemies, Robert Walpole, reason, lust, excrement, travel, ex-soldiers, Americans, patrons, opera, religious orthodoxies, sexual deviants, shopkeepers, dildos, merchants, political parties and all self-deluded asses who believe themselves superior to the rest of ...”

“... of the bed’ had been a widespread practice in the age of Louis XV, but now there were fresh young targets and, as the Revolution approached, a more beleaguered censorship. In the early pamphlets, beginning in 1770, the focus was Louis and his presumed impotence. The source here was gossip and perhaps leaked correspondence, and it seems likely that the ...”

“... As was, and remains, his custom, he nosed about on his own. One early non-Modernist influence was Robert Graves, and the ‘brusque conversational tone’ in some of his poetry. In the mid-1950s, the poet Gael Turnbull, who was editing a special British number for Cid Corman’s magazine Origin, took an interest in Fisher’s work and invited him to his home ...”

“... art history has mostly glanced over the commercial design in some embarrassment (at least Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns had the good taste to treat their window displays as rent-money work), sidelined the films and bemoaned his supposed decline after the 1968 shooting. Along with a few other contemporaries, Koestenbaum writes against all three ...”

“... The welfare state became the warfare state – an outcome Roosevelt neither foresaw nor desired. Robert Dallek is troubled by the absence of leadership in contemporary American politics, and his biography of FDR is meant to show us what the real thing looks like. ‘In this time of demoralisation,’ he writes, ‘it seems well to remind Americans that the ...”