“... Madeleine’s life, as in this exchange with a would-be boyfriend: On the wall of his living room Billy had painted the words Kill the Father. Killing the father was what, in Billy’s opinion, college was all about. ‘Who’s your father?’ he asked Madeleine. ‘Is it Virginia Woolf? Is it Sontag?’ ‘In my ...”

“... total defeat and ruin. The Justice Minister, Thomas Dehler, introducing the Bill, managed not to name the Nazi period, referring instead to ‘the confusion behind us’ and the ‘years of transition and . . . economic convulsion’. A second Amnesty Law in 1954 also bundled together those guilty of crimes committed during the last violent spasm of the ...”

“... had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless because Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) was published a little too late to be fitted into the fashionable grouping. Since the constituents of his mass biography led such ...”

“... its city centre, and to rebuild its economy. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, its hyphenated name a sign of media mergers, Dan Simpson’s column declares that if Pittsburgh is indeed one of the places where the election could be decided, ‘we want a decent running-back for the Steelers.’ The city is home to the Andy Warhol Museum on Sandusky ...”

“... more sociable, even on occasion what he called ‘comfy’, more in the manner of Uncle Wiz, a name conferred by affectionate friends. This latest instalment of Edward Mendelson’s edition of the Complete Works contains Auden’s prose writings from a mere six years, roughly the poet’s forties. It was preceded by two large volumes covering 1926 to 1938 ...”

“... on Emily Dickinson’s white dress, a replica of which is on display in Amherst. (Or, as in Billy Collins’s well-known wink-nudge piece, taking it off.) Pedestalisation and de-pedestalisation are two sides of the same coin, and both are beside the point. Farley and Roberts might recall the episode in The Trip where Steve Coogan explains to Rob Brydon ...”

“... are the onymous wealthy or celebrated or connected, who have the means to act on their prognosis. Billy Wilder’s apothegm that ‘the optimists died in the gas chambers, the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills’ is all the more bitter given that the optimists included three members of his immediate family who failed to get out.That failure – the word ...”

“... evaded onerous personal responsibilities, as most addicts do: primarily with respect to his son Billy, who pathetically aped his father’s protean drug and alcohol consumption, hoping to win his approval, and ended up dying of cirrhosis at 33. Burroughs repeatedly had other people bail him out of trouble with the law, and drew a generous allowance from ...”

“... me, I can perceive nothing but a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a Commonwealth.’) Bindoff would not have been in total disagreement. Although in temperament conservative, insisting that his lecturers at Queen Mary College wear suits, his outlook was the Butskellism which was the immediate legacy of the ...”

“... Customer Relationship Management (CRM) databases. ‘At a minimum these databases contain the name and email address of most of our users. For users of some of our services, these databases may also contain a postal address or telephone number.’The attack, which took place on 28 October, began with the wholesale copying of records held by the ...”

“... a performance only marginally less farcical than that of the man with his doll and his box. But a name is always a role for Borges, an idea of the self, and the interplay between actor and part takes many forms in his writing. In one of his early prose works, The Universal History of Infamy (1935), Borges says of Billy the ...”

“... Sir, was delicate, was nice; Bubo observes, he lash’d no sort of Vice: Horace would say, Sir Billy served the Crown, Blunt could do Bus’ness, H – ggins knew the Town. Erskine-Hill rightly points out that ‘Pope does not give this account of Horace in his own person but puts it into the mouth of the pusillanimous and time-serving “Friend”.’ It ...”

“... as one would expect of a European inclined to see in cinema the possibilities of High Art. The name suggests that Olga Mara is meant to stand in for Theda Bara. Bara was (despite the claim in Mariusz Kotowski’s subtitle) Hollywood’s original femme fatale, or, as they used to say, ‘vamp’. But she was merely a counterfeited version of European ...”

“... George W. Bush as a line of fashion accessories or a perfume does to the movie star that bears its name; he no doubt served in some advisory capacity. The words themselves have been assembled by Chris Michel (the young speechwriter and devoted acolyte who went to Yale with Bush’s daughter Barbara); a freelance editor, Sean Desmond; the staff at Crown ...”

“... is another standard move, and when Gates wants to create a more likeable male ironist – like Billy in ‘Star Baby’, the most effective story in The Wonders of the Invisible World, who’s seen giving ‘his best imitation of a guileless smile’ – he makes the character gay, perhaps to take the edge of eccentric wilfulness off his advanced sense of ...”