“... Measure. He moved to New York, where he worked at the Eighth Street Bookshop and posed for one of Andy Warhol’s screen tests (Warhol was a fan of the Wentley poems). The city was overwhelming, and by autumn 1963 he had to return to the family home outside Boston: ‘the tomb of middle-class America’, as he called it. ‘Tonight, I sit in the same bed I ...”

“... and Brenda wailed and pointed at Mercy, and Harness became over-excited and leapt up against Andy in semi-sexual assault, and Ruth just stood there, a giantess, and did nothing, and Bobbo lost his temper.’ When the dinner party breaks up, Bobbo denounces his wife as a she-devil. She decides to be a she-devil, which means to want ...”

“... who coined the term ‘TV’, a car salesman turned inventor called Earl ‘Madman’ Muntz, was a friend of my father’s. Dad had invested in Muntz TV, the first streamlined seventeen-tube low-cost black and white model, which Muntz began selling in 1947. In 1950 my sister, Jane, and I visited Muntz at home in Beverly Hills and encountered for the only time ...”

“... and donate it to the institute, all seemed saved – but after purchasing the land, this supposed friend of the movement got rid of the geodesic domes, composting toilets and fish tanks, and turned the property into a private farm. Bookchin and his followers soon found another home in the village of Plainfield, on a much smaller plot of land and without any ...”

“... Girl, the movie about Edie Sedgwick, the ultimate 1960s poor little rich girl. The film opens with Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) in a confessional box – always a good start – telling his priest how sad he is that someone else, not him, got to be punched at a party by Norman Mailer. ‘Why can’t I be punched by Norman Mailer?’ says the artist. Lennon is ...”

“... the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend Keats: ‘If this is not Shakespeare who is it? … As sure as you breathe & that he was the first of beings the Seal belonged to him – Oh Lord!’ The sceptic might answer that it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the ...”

“... for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the end of 2009, and by 2017 had sold more than 30,000 copies (55,000 and still rising by this March). It was followed in 2014 by Ghosts of My Life, then The Weird ...”

“... no point in bringing her home. That’s how it’s always been and that’s how it has to be.’ A friend booked her on the last passenger ship to sail before the war began. ‘I’ll never forget that afternoon,’ she wrote, ‘coming down the rue Cambon – my last afternoon in Paris for five years. I’d just had my last fitting at Chanel. I don’t think ...”

“... capital with her dreamy widower father, is flirting with her ‘uncle’ Renaud, a handsome older friend of the family by whom (though she hasn’t realised it yet) she desperately wants to be fucked. She tells him a titillating story about one of her school-mates in the country village of Montigny: ‘Take Célénie Nauphely, for example ...”

“... IN THE COR-BIN’, the threat posed by Corbyn and Labour was helpfully itemised: ‘Terrorists’ Friend; Useless on Brexit; Destroyer of Jobs; Enemy of Business; Massive Tax Hikes; Puppet of Unions; Nuclear Surrender; Ruinous Spending; Open Immigration; Marxist Extremist’. The next morning: ‘It is almost inconceivable that … the Tory majority may have ...”

“... expense. ‘Why do the friends do this? It can only be that they believe, in some real way, the friend’s life and work belongs to them … It speaks for them because they shared a place in time.’She begins her present book, which ‘may or may not be a biography of Kathy Acker’, by evoking the circles that gathered around her subject’s ashes in the ...”

“... console radio was set up in front of the screen, so that audiences could listen to Amos ’n’ Andy. Welles became a celebrated voice on the March of Time series and the voice of the fabled ‘Shadow’ himself. He was an enfant terrible in the theatre, with adaptations of Shakespeare, a negro Macbeth, a famous Mercury Julius Caesar and the banned The ...”

“... like, ‘When you go to Queensland there’s a contact there you should speak to.’ ‘You mean a friend?’ I’d say. ‘No. It’s more complicated than that.’ He appeared to like the notion that he was being pursued and the tendency was only complicated by the fact that there were real pursuers. But the pursuit was never as grave as he wanted it to ...”

“... Clark has unquestionably earned it, but at times it comes across as cajoling. Like a passionate friend tugging at one’s sleeve in a museum, he constantly enjoins us to see, to compare, to reconsider, and the intensity of this viewing-and-reviewing can be a bit wearing. (‘Enough with the blue-black curtain!’ is one of my margin notes in the chapter on ...”