“... people – Chekhov’s story ‘The Black Monk’, the futuristic philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov – bob up enigmatically throughout the book, as do thematically freighted, semi-surreal passages: ‘And still life goes on in Chekhov’s garden, where it’s always a fine day for hanging yourself, and somebody somewhere is ...”

“... had an almost uncanny ability to inspire musicians and find what was individual in their music. Bob Dylan, who listened to Sun radio recordings as a boy in the 1950s, described the music’s quality in Chronicles: ‘I’d always thought that Sun Records and Sam Phillips himself had created the most crucial, uplifting and powerful records ever made. On Sun ...”

“... is against humiliation, they are always busy with the effort to extricate themselves from the fine mess they bring about in one another’s lives. ‘Precision, as all the great clowns knew, is everything when dealing with chaos,’ Louvish writes, and this is true in Laurel and Hardy’s case not only in terms of the staging of physical gags, but in the ...”

“... desire to marry President Julius Nyerere or to box him with one arm tied behind his back – was a fine racist joke. It was the easiest story in the world to write: Radio Uganda, monitored in Nairobi, provided 90 per cent of the press coverage, and the rest was laid on in interviews with ‘His Excellency’ by ...”

“... alone in his dreams, Galileo unappreciated and persecuted. Never mind that Paul Rabinow’s fine book Making PCR makes a persuasive case that many people at the Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California, where Mullis then worked, had a hand in it, and that the discovery of PCR might be more plausibly referred to a corporate ethos (and a team of ...”

“... proceeds toward savagery,’ he wrote in ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ (1950). ‘And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.’ Once reserved for Algeria, India and Africa, ‘colonialist procedures’ are now ...”

“... which had already educated Will Eisner, one of the most revered figures in American comics, and Bob Kane and Bill Finger, the creators of Batman. He wouldn’t have been very interested in these predecessors at the time. ‘The funny thing is, I never was a comic book reader,’ he later said. ‘I only wrote ’em, but I didn’t like to read ...”

“... audience: the listener at home, alone in his room. Further books are scheduled in the series: on Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Björk. Each of these musicians is a virtuoso of one or another aspect of pop. Yet the first book to appear, by Richard Witts, tackles the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground were decidedly not these kinds of virtuoso. There are ...”

“... held themselves aloof from those with darker skin. In his 1945 novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, Bob Jones, a black ‘leaderman’ in an LA shipyard, is at a dinner party with a group of decorous middle-class blacks who ask his opinion on how to ‘integrate the people of this ghetto into the life of the community’. ‘Well, now,’ he replies, ‘I think ...”

“... his judgment by asking the younger people at the National what went on at their schools. Which is fine, though I can’t counter with a constituency of my own, as the only person I know who was at school in the 1980s is R. and he never set foot in the gym anyway. But the imagination can’t be subject to plebiscite. Take a poll of all the playwrights at the ...”

“... Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets … Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and Summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could ...”

“... couldn’t hide it.One contemporary noted the difference between Warhol and other gay artists. ‘Bob [Rauschenberg] and Jap [Johns] would even have women for dates and masked who they were,’ whereas Warhol ‘made a big effort to be, perhaps, much more swish than he really was’.Swish or not, it seemed to be fashionable not to like Warhol. A gallery owner ...”

“... of interference by the state’. Her anonymity, her everywomanishness, suited the court fine: Roe was just a stand-in. But Norma McCorvey – who would later say that she’d agreed to become Jane Roe in exchange ‘for a piece of pizza and a beer’ – never saw it that way. Estimates vary, but around 600,000 pregnancies are terminated every year ...”

“... and for nearly a decade were happy, until Dorothy fell in love with Macmillan’s fellow MP Bob Boothby and demanded a divorce, claiming that her youngest daughter, Sarah, was Boothby’s child. From being regarded as a jolly sort, keen on golf and a dab hand at opening fêtes, Dorothy suddenly revealed unsuspected Wagnerian depths of passion, saying to ...”

“... House Hotel riot – a Cambridge protest against the rule of the Greek colonels – there is Bob Rowthorn, ‘then as now the best-looking economist in a not very photogenic class’; in Cambridge, among those who sat at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when ...”