“... with appreciation. Politicians understood payback. He dishes out the same kid-glove treatment to Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, even John Major, whom he was meant to despise because of the help the Tories had offered to Republicans trawling for smears during the 1992 election. ‘“I kind of like old John,” Clinton said, “but a lot of people don’t.”’ In ...”

“... history. Yet Biden was furious and openly threatened ‘consequences’. The Democratic Senator Bob Menendez demanded that the US cease all co-operation with Saudi Arabia, including weapons sales; even Bernie Sanders agreed. The cut in supply would mean an increase in the price of crude oil – indeed, OPEC spokespeople said this was its purpose – and ...”

“... the aforementioned curry – I could have pitched him headlong into the Corrib and watched him bob up and down out to Galway Bay humming like Bing Crosby, an odd and gaseous swan gone belly-up from bad food and good riddance. But really the review wasn’t as bad as it was, well, ‘fair’ and any ink is better than no ink, after all. And I like ...”

“... are taken from the memoirs of members of the Bush administration and journalistic accounts such as Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack and Bush at War. To complete the cycle of postmodernity, there are bits of dialogue lifted from Woodward, who is notorious for inventing dialogue. Occasionally, someone on Team DP will insert a lyrical phrase – the tears on the ...”

“... by Ashbery’s bravura showing on Quiz Kids: Do you ever offer scholarships to boys who are fine students – really Brilliant – yet do not meet the qualifications of well-rounded boys? I would be so glad to gamble five hundred dollars on a boy by the name of John Ashbery, if you would be willing to have him at Deerfield for one year (1943-44) with ...”

“... spring, Redding played a series of shows at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. On the first night, Bob Dylan turned up with an advance pressing of ‘Just Like a Woman’, which he hoped Redding would cover. (‘I like it but it’s got too many fuckin’ words,’ Redding said, according to another of his biographers. ‘All these pigtails and bobbytails and ...”

“... the March on Washington.) Baker reappeared at Carnegie Hall in 1973 to sing, among other numbers, Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’.There is a fourth picture on the opening page of illustrations in The Josephine Baker Story. Taken in the 1950s, it shows Baker’s mother and sister with her nephew’s French wife and child in the Baker family ...”

“... directly. Yet both books illuminate its importance.To begin with, and as several of Daniels’s fine, perceptive essays suggest, knowing that they were an imperial people made Britons at once triumphantly arrogant and potentially nervous. Arrogant because so much of the world was coloured red, nervous because the scope of their dominion as against the ...”

“... are not a new invention, yet their impact on economic growth has been slow to manifest itself. Bob Solow, another Nobel laureate quoted by Brynjolfsson and McAfee, observed as long ago as 1987 that ‘we see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.’ The most thorough and considered version of this argument is in the work of ...”

“... OK, he said, the march was good, but to be honest, I’m glad to be going home. The drumming is fine, but when you’ve been doing it for ages, it starts to get on your nerves.ACOP​ is a Conference of the Parties, the ‘parties’ being the states that signed up to the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted after the ...”

“... Nobody quite agrees on who or what is ‘proud’, and both translators get over the problem fine, even if there’s a case for the umbels, or Mason’s generic ‘flowers’, being too tall for Madame’s liking. Sorrell is more literal with the figure of the running woman: it’s not just that she ‘gives chase’, but that she starts to do so after ...”

“... more than a quarter of a billion quid in fines.) Its chairman, Marcus Agius, and chief executive, Bob Diamond, both resigned. In December, the Swiss bank UBS agreed to pay $1.2 billion to the DoJ and the CFTC, £160 million to the FSA, and 59 million in Swiss francs to the regulators back in the old country. That’s a total £970 million, from a bank which ...”

“... Zappa didn’t do drugs. He used junk imagery as part of the weave: ‘Wanna buy some mandies, Bob?’ He was teasing the hippie manifesto, ripping it apart (the Marxist interpretation begins to make sense). Like Charles Manson – the dimestore, reformatory version – Zappa pushed satire a tad beyond acceptable limits, appearing to be precisely the thing ...”

“... mind us, son,’ said the woman nearest, with a cough. ‘Not at all. No problem. It’s fine.’ My mother and the women exchanged looks and smiles. Alice was great; she seemed so alive and well-tuned. She looked like she knew her way around herself. And here was the person she wanted to be. Her hair all layered and tinted in a shop. Her make-up ...”

“... As far as Morrissey was concerned, as long as you didn’t eat meat (and had nice hair) it was fine by him if you were a demented gangland killer. The song represented a dandy’s only excursion into morality. Matthew Herbert inherits a genre that has become both diluted and specialised – two strains of oversophistication. Instead of resisting these ...”