“... last joke in 1988 when she made an appearance on Aspel and Company, the ITV chat show hosted by Michael Aspel, one of a handful of Alan Partridgesque men who for decades had a monopoly on interviewing film stars on British TV. Taylor had recently completed her second stint at the Betty Ford Centre, where she was treated for alcoholism and other addictions ...”

“... are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its essential account of exactly what James was doing in his conduct of his career as a ...”

“... is that their tree form is at the mercy of all comers, and we see a pair of sinners, pursued by black hell-hounds, crash into one of them (a Florentine), drawing blood from him and scattering his branches. The opening words of the next canto are ‘Poichè la carità del natio loco/mi strinse, raunai le fronde sparte,/e rende’ le a colui ch’ era gia ...”

“... at our heads and demanded that we renounce Christ. When we got home from school, our flickering black and white televisions escalated the Communophobic barrage. The FBI Story, a weekly drama, competed in unmasking disloyalty with the real House Un-American Activities Committee and its Senate equivalent under Joe McCarthy. Commies, loners and eggheads were ...”

“... This morning there is a man in a short black coat running across a high brick wall; a hunchbacked fly springing sticky-fingered from perch to perch, before dropping heavily into the street. The wall – weathered yellow brick grouted with carbon deposits and grime – is enough of a barrier to have doubled in television films, cop shows or faked documentaries as the exterior of a prison ...”

“... but not by the thought of the poll tax. It happened to be the same cabinet meeting which Michael Heseltine had stormed out of, to tell the waiting press that he was resigning from the government over the Westland issue. That was the big story, for politicians and journalists alike. The poll tax became an afterthought. The press didn’t pursue it ...”

“... at least three forms of academic study which would seem to constitute a challenge to it: Feminism, Black Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies. Surely the effects of feminism extend far beyond the academy’s precincts and surely feminists who actively work in the public sphere make use of arguments and slogans developed and elaborated in the classroom and in ...”

“... growing up in a tough but precariously self-respecting community which would later become a black ghetto, Podhoretz was the star pupil in the local high school, where white students felt threatened by gangs of teenaged blacks. In his 1963 essay ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’, this early experience of feeling, as a white boy, that it is he, not the ...”

“... the shore facing the island of Mona (Anglesey), awed by an opposing army strengthened by women in black waving torches and druidae invoking curses. Roman discipline reasserts itself. The legionaries advance, mowing down any resistance and burning the groves with their bloodstained altars – a scene powerfully recapitulated in George Shipway’s novel of the ...”

“... Ezra Pound didn’t say the apparition of those faces in the crowd was like ‘petals on a wet, black bough’, and after a hundred such comparisons, riddling one paragraph after another (‘like bulletholes’, I am tempted to say), the device emerges for what it is: a tic. Similes, however, are perfect for suggesting the dissociative mental state of ...”

“... sounds like Chandler, the heroine muses in a Woolfian fugue and so on (the veteran translator Michael Henry Heim was in action here). This time, Canongate has reproduced her polyphony of registers by commissioning three translators to work on the different parts of the book and give the memoir, fiction and essay a different feel. Ugrešić studied in ...”

“... Beast’ herself, doing a photo-shoot for David Bailey, ‘sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs’. Melvyn Bragg, filming his reaction shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails’. Richard Harris at the Savoy in 1990, ‘playing pocket ...”

“... they slobber over: ‘Naomi had set up her three wireless Speedlight flash units with the chunky black wireless SU-800 Commander, which controlled and triggered the flashes using infrared pulses, locked in her D300s’s hot shoe.’ Since both thirtysomethings are photojournalists who ‘scratch and sample’ their stories into being, they at least have a ...”

“... TV drama showing a girl finding her voice, her development signalled by her stylish clothes (‘a black coat with an ocelot collar’) and a near mystical level of haircare. Dependency, the last instalment in the trilogy, isn’t an uplifting coming-of-age story. Fame arrives for Ditlevsen, but self-assurance doesn’t. She becomes involved with Piet ...”

“... of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition at that time, mostly crumbling tenements, more than half of them without an inside bath and with a loo on the stairs.Just west of Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the ...”