“... begin his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police ...”

“... soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew found her individual voice, all these influences persisted, just as her school friends remained her first and last refuge throughout her life. With them, there was less need for ...”

“... to or falling back upon the established conventions of seriousness, be they the realism of James or the modernism of Joyce?That’s a problem for every generation. Ambitious young writers are always tempted to imitate those verified by authority; the influence of an established writer upon a beginning writer has almost entirely to do with the search ...”

“... Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding the waves of this ...”

“... Gregory, who can see connections that everyone else misses, such as between the patterns on Burger King buns and the price of sesame seed futures.) But having put his money into Facebook, Thiel did his best to take it out again. In 2006 he tried to persuade Zuckerberg to sell the business to Yahoo for $1 billion, confident that the offer greatly overvalued the ...”

“... man ‘who began his memoir with the sentence: “In a land of moral imbeciles, I knew I could be king.”’ All the same, the final stretch of Lee’s life was quite sad, and in Riesman’s telling it becomes a kind of goofy parable about the dangers of attaching a single face to collaborative endeavours. There’s a theory that the modern notion of ...”

“... sense of precision, and his reticence. No one has said that Armstrong was garrulous, but in James Hansen’s biography, First Man, as well as in the film made of the book starring Ryan Gosling and in the recent documentary Armstrong, he comes across as a man of understated wit. Asked to describe what had been a near-death experience, Armstrong merely ...”

“... Beale was raped, resulting in a child she gave up for adoption. Later she was raped again, by James Willmott-Brown, a slick entrepreneur who had given her a job at his wine bar, and who will return decades later to stalk her. The scene in which she confronts him has become legendary – not just because she grabs him by the balls, and threatens to serve ...”

“... realised that the only way his opposition men could form a stable government was by forcing the king to accept contentious policies at the outset. He made Catholic Emancipation, and eventually parliamentary reform, the price of taking office. Otherwise, he insisted, he would stay in Northumberland. This stance kept him out of government until 1830 and ...”

“... stratified and ossified that it required six generations of nobility to be allowed to follow the king’s hunt. A petition to be received at Versailles was turned down on the grounds that a member of the vicomte’s family had been found to have usurped their title in 1667.Joséphine, too, was rebuffed in her early attempts to restyle herself for life in ...”

“... A senior State Department official was sandwiched into a corner at the top of the stairs. James O’Keefe, the founder of the far-right activist group Project Veritas, was the DJ.Downstairs, a conservative law clerk was introducing himself to Stewart Rhodes as a fellow Yale Law School grad. They compared notes on different professors. The law clerk ...”

“... words’. Freelancing at the New Yorker, she did her best to shock Ross, who, according to James Thurber, had ‘an editorial phobia’ about ‘bathroom and bedroom’ stuff. ‘We damn near printed a newsbreak about a girl falling off the roof,’ Ross once confided to Thurber. ‘That’s feminine hygiene, somebody told me just in time.’ (On ...”

“... as a crampon. Granted, ‘My Name Is Prince’ comes out of an old-school black tradition, a James Brown-style boast: ‘On the seventh day he made – me!’ But the tone is all wrong: there’s no self-mockery here; he sounds desperate. On the lamentable rap ‘Sexy MF’, there’s no actual emotion in his voice; it’s about as erotic as the ...”

“... Cork. Townsend went on to found Art Monthly in 1976 with Jack and Nell Wendler. Under Townsend, James Faure-Walker had been a contributor to Studio International. Cork made his copy less welcome and Faure-Walker and others set up Artscribe. Eventually Peter and I began to meet at Bertorelli’s for wine, talk, food and more wine. At my suggestion, John Tagg ...”

“... iv) in a review by Kingsley, Ricks notices the witty conflation of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the King Charles spaniel in I ix – but others are of real significance. Ricks doesn’t cite Tennyson’s revealing comment that the narrator’s belief in the innate patriotism of the commercial classes (‘For I trust if an enemy’s fleet came yonder round by ...”