“... was the rustle of the Holy Ghost, hers an oracular hooga-booga. The objections that Howe, Rahv, John Simon, the art critic Hilton Kramer and other keepers of the scrolls lodged against her were as much about the 1960s as they were about her, for no one in the Family (as Norman Podhoretz, a former Partisan Review-er, dubbed them) personified the 1960s more ...”

“... spectacular ways of showing what their product could do. At an exhibition in San Antonio in 1876, John Gates (then just an agent for the manufacturers, later an iron magnate in his own right) sealed off part of the town’s central plaza with barbed-wire fencing and packed it with dozens of fierce-looking longhorn steers. When the animals charged the ...”

“... that the screenwriter and lyricist Jacob Brackman liked nitrous oxide so much he filled a six-foot tank with it at home and deducted it as a medical expense.There are only glancing references to substance abuse in Pandora’s Box. As for sex, Biskind’s consciousness of the obstacles and attacks experienced by women in showbusiness – as well as by ...”

“... MP and the owner of an Amsterdam pizzeria.Radoman wasn’t just a sailor. In the 2000s he became a foot soldier in the trade that shifts billions of dollars’ worth of cocaine from South America to Europe every year. Over the last two decades this business has increasingly come to be controlled by gangs from the Balkans, and is now dominated by ...”

“... punishment in the United States subsists – inescapably – in a miasma of race. The Honorable John H. Land in 1977 presided over the trial of a black man called William Brooks, whose case McFeely follows. Land is the son of a prominent local dignitary who had seen to the lynching of an adolescent boy 65 years earlier. The barefoot ‘little black ...”

“... some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair Reid, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander. He also worked with Borges on translating his prose works into English, and coaxed him into producing new stories and a long autobiographical piece for the New Yorker. All of this is vividly described in The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His ...”

“... imagination Carter may perform, she always comes to rest in the right ideological position,’ John Bayley wrote in a notoriously slighting 1992 review: the ballet idea works well, but otherwise he’s a bit tin-eared. A ‘moral pornographer’, Carter called herself sometimes; she could also have called herself an ideological choreographer. It’s not ...”

“... from his first physiognomic depiction as the outcome of Charles Bovary’s operation on the club-foot, once the chemist produces his nostrum), remains as distant from the construction of any serious history as Tolstoy’s insistence on its unintelligibility. In Ginzburg’s use of the novels as exemplars, features of them such as these, which do not serve ...”

“... the BBC who couldn’t be public, but we can name them now – Ken Trodd, Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, John McGrath. You know, from the cultural milieu. There was Clive, Fred Halliday, later Sheila Rowbotham got involved, and Roger Smith, script editor at the BBC. The French May erupted as we were about to launch the first issue, which had come out looking ...”

“... the morning and read in the afternoon. This was the old Coventry Central Library, nestling at the foot of the unbombed cathedral, filled with tall antiquated bookcases (blindstamped Coventry Central Libraries after the fashion of the time) with my ex-schoolfellow Ginger Thompson ... This was my first experience of the addictive excitement a large open-access ...”

“... in Scotland) and the second with one favoured by Uruguay (made in England). The Belgian referee, John Langenus (who, Wilson somehow resists adding, had failed his first refereeing exam when unable to answer the question ‘What is the correct procedure if the ball strikes a low-flying plane?’), was so concerned for his own safety that he arranged a ...”

“... wave of appointees also included one who was, in the words of an admirer, Europe’s equivalent of John Marshall, the patriarch of the Supreme Court in the US, responsible for establishing its authority across the land. Robert Lecourt was a leading politician in the French version of the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany, the Mouvement ...”

“... for the day and made her way home. Grenfell Tower and the low-rise blocks at the tower's foot shortly after they were finished in 1974. Standing at 221 feet, Grenfell Tower was opened in 1974. It is owned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and was managed on behalf of the council by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management ...”

“... three acknowledged illegitimate children. ‘I wonder what Lady Wilde thought of her husband?’ John Butler Yeats wrote to his son in 1921. ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when her circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it – so that she could afford to be wise and tolerant.’ (Mrs Butt’s husband was ...”

“... through it, or who had seen it but hadn’t noticed how deep it was, and slammed down, first one foot, then the other, to make the water splash up over the top of my boots. For a minute or so, I became the rough boy I never wanted to be. Next there was the delay as the tickets had to be bought, and the small violet or cherry-coloured pieces of paper curled ...”