“... one of her teachers (‘I suppose I threw myself at him but I hoped not in any obvious way’), a young man of 23, called Steven Weed – not a name that would necessarily wish fame upon itself. He won a teaching fellowship at Berkeley, and she went with him, enrolling as an undergraduate, eventually to do art history – ‘I had been surrounded by art all ...”

“... king. A spectacular example is Ray Dalio, whose story is excellently told in The Fund by Rob Copeland, a reporter at the New York Times who was formerly the hedge fund beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal.Dalio is the founder and principal owner of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge fund. He grew up in a working-class family in Manhasset on ...”

“... this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and son Freddy (five), worried because he had been unable to resist giving Freddy a kiss. Freddy is still at infants’ school. Had Rupert been vaccinated when I was, we ...”

“... pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious. Crowe’s scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and doodled ballpoint stars meant to ward off evil influences. Bowie revealed an enthusiasm for Aleister Crowley’s system of ...”

“... aristocracy of welfare dependence’ – grammar school, Oxford on a grant, the easy-if-you’re-young-and-single 1980s dole. So he’s well read and fittingly self-conscious, aware that the unease he feels is not his alone, but one of the classic modernist positions. He’d like to be ‘no more than a single human man’, in the words of his hero, DHL, but ...”

“... didn’t last, but Jean did secure two long interviews with the man himself, and she told the young editors George Plimpton and Robert Silvers that she would give the interview to the Paris Review, so long as they made her an associate editor. They took the material (Number 12 in their famous series ‘The Art of Fiction’) and Stein got her place on the ...”

“... over their heads; they sign on freely and fearlessly to terrorise against the war, competent to rob at gun-point, equipped in every way to maim and kill with explosives, undeterred by fear or doubt or inner contradiction – girls in hiding, dangerous girls, attackers, implacably extremist, completely unsociable. Any writer charged with reviewing a Roth ...”

“... visit to Turkey in early March in order (they feared) to enlist Turkish support in his bid to rob them of their quasi-independence within Iraq. Above all, the Kurdish leaders fear that Jaafari is manoeuvring to avoid implementing an agreement under which they would gain permanent control of the oil province of Kirkuk, which they captured at the start of ...”

“... to their patients. Needless to say, puerperal fever was unknown in home births using midwives. A young Victorian noblewoman who developed a bulge in her abdomen was declared pregnant by physicians who did not feel free to examine her beyond the point of ascertaining that she was a virgin. Virginity was apparently no proof against pregnancy, and good manners ...”

“... which he prefers to call by its former German name, Danzig, is harassed by three women out to rob him – Gypsies, he assumes, who ‘probably lived off hedgehogs baked in clay on an open fire’. Though no Catholic, he responds by crossing himself, at which the women call him a bastard and back off. The novel is more ambivalent than the scene would ...”

“... Easter Sunday fell on April Fools’ Day in 1934. A young woman called Bonnie Parker was sitting in a field by a narrow dirt road near the town of Grapevine, Texas, playing with a white rabbit that she had named Sonny Boy. She was waiting for her mother, to whom she intended to give the rabbit as an Easter present, but the rendezvous got delayed ...”

“... a loyal, indeed patriotic citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which has recently been reformed by the Young Turks. In 1908 their revolution allowed the emergence of political parties, instituted elections and ordained a new pluralist order whereby non-Muslim subjects were elevated into full citizens, who might serve in the armed forces as officers of any ...”

“... settling at the block because of the largeness of her breasts. A fourth Cenci, Bernardo, too young to be actively involved, was forced to watch the killing of his kin and was despatched to the galleys thereafter. The affair was a cause célèbre, which echoed briefly through the newsletters of the day: ‘The death of the ...”

“... the new vision of history as an irrational torrent rather than an orderly stream – seemed to rob its defenders of any capacity to resist. For a class used to being masters of their fate, the revolution was a lesson in human helplessness which left them immobilised for the rest of their lives. Count Bobrinskoy, a rich landowner’s son from the province ...”

“... for good. ‘Making something of yourself in the world’, as Pelzer sees it, is the only way to rob a sad childhood of its dark victory over your experience. For the newer kind of celebrity, the contemplation of the Nobody years becomes a guaranteed way of justifying the Somebody years and all the excesses that Somebodyhood might involve. Fame finally gets ...”