“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... among ‘fucking queer intellectual bastards’. In no time he and Simon, dressed only in little white towels, are padding through a gay sauna near the Gare de Lyon in search of a young man called Hamed, to whom Barthes might have given a copy of the missing document. Hamed, they’ve been told, has a fringe and an earring, but the steam makes it hard to ...”

“... Reagan, of Hollywood, Disneyland and John Wayne. Nixon would have lost his home state and the White House in 1968 without his Southern California support. At the 1984 Republican Convention, Reagan, our second Southern California President, was the subject of a celebratory film: it was introduced, as Richard Slotkin points out in Gunfighter Nation ...”

“... leaves and the dust from old pollarded willows to use as compost, grew a prized variety of red and white striped carnation, known as a ‘flake’, or ‘Hufton’s Magnificent’. Hufton walked the ten miles from his cottage in Shipley in Derbyshire to Nottingham and back to show his flowers, carrying a dozen pots from his shoulders like a milkmaid’s ...”

“... stockmen have gone. It is in Queensland, more than anywhere, that you feel the weight of the brief white Australian past, begin to know how much is over and finished with in this trumpeted country of the future. Germaine Greer’s experience of Queensland arose from the rumour that the young Reg Greer might have gone there jackerooing. She found the ...”

“... or fitful intimation. Art, or theory, is the enemy of the natural and familiar. Felski quotes Judith Butler as denigrating the familiar in contrast to the other or unknown, a standard postmodern move; but one continues to hope in one’s churlish, outmoded way that the species will remain unfamiliar with global nuclear war, while recalling that the ...”

“... to diversify the sorts of voices heard’. In the United States the villains, if I follow Judith Hallett correctly, are the immigrants from classical departments in Europe, whose stranglehold on prestigious jobs, and so also on the definition of ‘standards’, has largely prevented the development of an authoritatively American voice in ...”

“... weird, friendless kid, desperate to be cool. He writes of dyeing his hair blond (Rodger was half-white and half-Malaysian; blond people were ‘so much more beautiful’); of finding ‘sanctuary’ in Halo and World of Warcraft; being shoved by a pretty girl at summer camp (‘That was the first experience of female cruelty I endured, and it traumatised me ...”

“... his ‘raw, emotional intensity and sublime, transcendent beauty’ and approvingly quotes Judith Thurman’s claim that McQueen’s fashions were a kind of ‘confessional poetry’. Bolton continues: ‘He was a designer of unrivalled courage who seemed to find creative freedom through his torments. What you saw in his work was the man ...”

“... a Courbet painting to the poetry of Plath and Sexton. In some cases – Clarissa or ‘Snow White’, for example – the dead body itself becomes a material icon or fetish; in others, like Wuthering Heights or Dracula, men struggle with women who hover uncannily between life and death; in still others, the mourner’s desire to replicate the beloved ...”

“... up this way, after abandoning a lucrative career as a management consultant in Manhattan and the white-collar criminal defence lawyer boyfriend of her twenties. (‘You didn’t expect this of the Woman Upstairs.’) The idea of getting comfortably rich in Westchester County bored her, so she left New York to pursue her youthful passion: art. She never ended ...”

“... reflect awareness of their condition as women and as women writers ... present-day, middle-class white women must win their place in competition with many others, by virtue of high literary ambition, or creative excellence, or feminist perception, or energetic output, or high profile.’ Jacqueline Susann is listed in The Guinness Book of Records as author ...”

“... cohesion. Classes consolidate, whites push down on blacks, blue collars are hemmed in by white collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and banks. Auschwitz may have been a world away from Levittown, but in Hannah Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism – ‘destroying all space between men and pressing men against ...”

“... his Presidency, Kennedy took at least two large and by now well-known chances: his affairs with Judith Campbell Exner, who was also the girlfriend of the mobster Sam Giancana, and with Ellen Rometsch, who was believed to be an East German spy and had to be spirited out of the country. His recklessness was far greater than Bill Clinton’s (Dallek found that ...”

“... had already been widowed when she accompanied her mother-in-law, Naomi, on the return to Judah. Judith, famous for beheading Holofernes, is honoured instead for her chaste widowhood. The Knight of the Tower moralises the tragic tale of Dinah. In Genesis, the girl’s rapist offers to marry her, even submitting his people to circumcision to that end, only to ...”