“... someone really insane to fix the economy’; but by the time he wrote about politics, profiling John McCain for Rolling Stone in 2000, he was basically a liberal Democrat.) His roommate Mark Costello became a lifelong confidant and sometime collaborator. (Costello is now a novelist in New York and teaches law at Fordham University.) Wallace’s depression ...”

“... exhibition of its own. A professor of drama at Columbia has just donated 193 pieces to the Perry Ellis archive at the Fashion Institute of Technology. ‘Traditionally most designers did not think of archiving their careers,’ Valerie Steele, the curator (and editor of Fashion Theory), points out. ‘Only very recently have they become aware that to ...”

“... between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a ...”

“... culturally and psychologically, about every aspect of sex. The process culminated in Havelock Ellis and Freud in the 19th century, and in Masters and Johnson and their imitators in the 20th. Foucault was a philosopher who knew little history, so he read scientific texts and paid scant attention to the enormous weight of evidence supporting the theory that ...”

“... as an article of faith in the ‘blankness’ of mimetic apprehension in the work of Bret Easton Ellis and others). A moment like this occurs in White’s essay, ‘Fantasia on the Seventies’, when he visits a club where a go-go boy with a pretty body and bad skin stripped down to his jockey shorts and then peeled those off and tossed them at us. A burly ...”

“... mother bombarded him with advice; his tutor at Cambridge was the future archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift; and his godfather, the Earl of Bedford, provided him with a seat in Parliament. But he was short of money and had expensive tastes. He became a barrister at Gray’s Inn, rising rapidly to become a highly successful advocate and legal adviser to ...”

“... says. You might indeed hope for a miracle, at that price. It costs £33.50 for 56.7 grams from John Lewis, which works out at £591 per kilo; at the time of writing, the price of silver is around £420. But you can’t rub solid silver into your wrinkles: even in the form of a necklace, it can only adorn; it cannot transform. Jones asks: What are ...”

“... to see into the experiences of those around him, an oafish Thackeray, and Dickens’s biographer John Forster, who SHOUTS IN CAPITALS, as well as George Cruikshank the angry cartoonist.Male novelists, however, are peripheral to The Fraud. At its centre is the strange case of the Tichborne Claimant, which dominated the news and the popular imagination through ...”

“... is still, for many people, synonymous with West Africa. According to the historian Stephen Ellis, the first recorded example of the 419 scam (also known as an advance-fee scam or Nigerian prince scam) dates to 1920, in what was then the British Gold Coast. The early targets tended to be members of the emerging local elites. In the mid-20th ...”

“... one Sinatra’s name was often linked with. Consider the following, from Cosa Nostra (2004), John Dickie’s history of the Sicilian Mafia: ‘Anyone who was worthy of being described as mafioso therefore had a certain something, an attribute called “mafia”. “Cool” is about the closest modern English equivalent.’ Discourse among ‘men of ...”

“... truth, that the wrench is too great for any but the hardest-hearted woman. Even then, as with Ruth Ellis, the last woman executed in England, there is an evil, compelling genius – David Blakeley, murdered by her as her only escape – or, as with Myra Hindley, an evil, compelling ‘mad’ genius, Ian Brady, virtually taking over her soul by making her do ...”

“... Pollock was distancing himself from Benton. Some time in the late Thirties he began to frequent John Graham, that most mysterious of all the gurus of European Modernism. Graham took him up, reinforcing his faith in unconscious imagery. From now on, Pollock transferred his admiration and his envy to Picasso, enlarging his ambition to a world scale. Guernica ...”

“... he washes down a dozen Quaaludes with Jack Daniels. His youthful exploits make for a Bret Easton Ellis cocktail of privilege, debauchery and brand-names. ‘Barbara, the cocaine abuser, had encouraged me, after a night at Danceteria, to chop lines of that fell drug with her on her parents’ Roy Lichtenstein print.’ True co-dependency is achieved when he ...”

“... the fortune-telling needs of the holidaying working classes, while the entrepreneurial (non-Roma) Ellis family set up in respectable brick and mortar premises, publishing a monthly magazine titled Know Thyself and offering the middle classes health advice that included physiognomy and phrenological skull-reading as well as palmistry. Chirologists with ...”

“... Council photograph of Raymond has as its gratuitously spiteful caption a quotation from Dafydd-Ellis Thomas, ‘the best-cut tweeds on the Left’. Still more gratuitous is the sneering caption which Inglis has dreamed up for a photograph of Raymond and Joy, taken in 1940-1 during their courting days – the kind of loving picture which would not look out ...”