“... waterfront. Already a celebrity, his fame spread way beyond the theatre with his marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1956 (‘Local Resident Will Marry Miss Monroe of Hollywood,’ his local paper announced: ‘Roxbury Only Spot in World to Greet News Calmly’). Ever more bound up with Monroe and her problems, facing his own hearing before the House ...”

“... The French word​ for rape is viol. It signals the violence and violation inherent to the acts it names. Since early September, Dominique Pelicot, a 71-year-old Frenchman, has been on trial in Avignon for repeatedly drugging his wife, Gisèle, and raping her as she slept. He is also charged with inviting at least 72 other men into their home to do the same, on 92 occasions between July 2011 and October 2020, an average of about once every five weeks (Pelicot has admitted to raping her two or three times a week during this period, roughly 1400 times in total ...”

“... if the camera hurt her. But while many hostile to the movies rose in defence of the devastation of Marilyn Monroe – whether or not she was a sentient victim – Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience and now looks dignified, reflective, and responsive to feeling where Monroe appears ...”

“... his theories were based on the analysis of very short people.’ After many generous tributes to Marilyn Monroe, a pain on the set but a wonder on the screen, Wilder loses patience a little. Crowe asked him if he complimented her at the time, and Wilder says: ‘No. She was always crying.’ Modestly saying that all he wants is that people should talk about ...”

“... in it,’ Southey wrote thirty years later, ‘can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.’ Each saw in the other, or thought he did, an agent of that ...”

“... was writing in al-Ahram: ‘British intelligence assassinated Diana to save the throne, just as Marilyn Monroe was assassinated by American intelligence. Never before, not even during the days of Crom-well, did any one person manage single-handedly to shake the foundations of the royal family.’ Once the Windsors were convinced that Diana ‘would marry a ...”

“... standing as a poet has been doubtful or negligible. This is a position firmly summarised in Marilyn Butler’s handbook, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981). She argues that the only Coleridge to pause over is the man whose ‘really significant or at least influential career was as a moulder of opinion’ – that is, as a political ...”

“... we could bear life without a plot. An epigraph to the screenplay of True Romance, attributed to ‘French critics on the films of Roger Corman’, says: ‘His films are a desperate cry from the heart of a grotesque fast-food culture.’ In Tarantino the cry is not desperate, and his characters are capable of quoting this line as a joke. In Natural Born ...”

“... as a BMI of more than 30. For a sense of what these numbers mean, Leopold Bloom had a BMI of 23.8. Marilyn Monroe varied between 21 and 24. ‘Underweight’ is defined as below 18.5. During the past twenty years models in Playboy have gone down from 19 to 16.5. Fauja Singh, the fastest man on earth over the age of 90, has a BMI of 15.4. Autism resists ...”

“... as the ‘necessity to “relativise” heroism’, which is what we do when we disparage the French Resistance, or when we call Salvador Allende ‘a racist, an anti-semite and a eugenicist, for the purpose of denigrating the putative founding myths of socialism around the world’. Heroism, socialism and rebellion turn out to be synonymous, and the ...”

“... an operation before she could conceive. She waited until Harry left on a business trip, sold a French war bond given to her by an uncle and went under the knife. Soon she was pregnant.When Schwartz learned that his birth was the result of a deception it strengthened the feeling he had struggled with all his life: that perhaps he should not have existed at ...”

“... Channing-Eve Harrington face-off, but Susan Sontag wasn’t the new Mary McCarthy, any more than Marilyn Monroe had been the new Betty Grable. Sontag the public sensation (as opposed to Sontag the perpetual grad-school grind) was the star-child of Pop Art and New Wave. To see her in sunglasses was to see it was so. And in Roger Straus, the dapper major domo ...”

“... validate my experience of reading, and relishing, the novel London Bridge. How had the trepanned French maniac achieved such a rapturous sense of the city’s psychogeography – Willesden to Soho to Rotherhithe? I was introduced at the desk, in the way that one is, to an American writer who told me that he’d heard about my novels, even picked up ...”

“... juxtaposed Western consumer or showbiz symbols with Soviet icons – Leonid Sokov’s Stalin and Marilyn, for instance, or Alexander Kosolapov’s Plan for an Advertisement in Times Square (a huge red poster with the Coca-Cola sign and Lenin’s face on it, and the slogan ‘it’s the real thing – Lenin’). By the late Eighties, everyone could be his own ...”

“... 1964-65 was a honeymoon in sound for him. In his early twenties, newly married (to the singer Marilyn Rovell), and with his brother Beach Boys away on tour, he began working with the very hip and preternaturally versatile Wrecking Crew. He used these master craftsmen to produce Pet Sounds, a work he pieced together more as if it were a film than a pop ...”