“... either a runaway boy or a drifter, joining a Legion where no questions need be asked. That’s why William Burroughs was such a tangible influence on Warholism. And speaking of the feral, affectless manner, I can never forget Burroughs telling a film interviewer that, when he was a boy, mothers would warn their children against playing with him. ‘They said I ...”

“... Attorney’s office, and the fortuitous presence of the Canadian intelligence co-ordinator Sir William Stephenson, Gouzenko might have shared the wretched fate of his ambassador, bundled onto a Soviet freighter in New York for home, and the mercies of the KGB. The pattern didn’t change until the Sixties, when we began to breed our own moles. Mr ...”

“... picture of a Spain bristling with violence on the verge of becoming a world power. The historian William Atkinson could be called prescient for writing, early this century, that the accession of a woman is ‘an event commonly fraught with untoward consequences’. He was, however, talking about the ‘salvation’ of Castile in the 1470s, not Britain in ...”

“... sugar lobbyists received a sympathetic hearing from the director of the Office of Global Affairs, William Steiger, a godson of the first President Bush. ‘Sound science’, abetted by the Data Quality Act, was his bludgeon of choice in attacking the report, even though researchers in his own department had participated in its preparation and endorsed it as a ...”

“... in discussing the impact of the early settlers on the North American environment, he cites not William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1983), now the standard work on the subject, but Civilisation and Climate by Ellsworthy Huntington, published in 1925. His account of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War rehashes long-discredited myths: that Congress ...”

“... up the pieces when it was over. But the valet has his angry moments, too. He doesn’t like Joseph Kennedy when he comes to stay and, overall, he fails to extend the same tolerance to Ambassadorial bootleggers that he does to warbling whore-wranglers: He not only told nigger jokes throughout the meals, he’d call the Indians ‘savages’ and the blacks ...”

“... we have experienced. And it’s not where we were when we heard about the assassination of Jack Kennedy, but what we were watching: television. Home alone, or straining the neck to look at a wall-mounted set in a half-empty restaurant, we were in thrall to waveringly remote prints of reality. Meanwhile, on the same afternoon, the nominated ...”

“... 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got ...”

“... the final years of public fame, culminating in Frost’s reading of ‘The Gift Outright’ at the Kennedy Inauguration and his meeting with Khrushchev in Russia. The problem for any contemporary biographer is that Lawrance Thompson is the only source for much of Frost’s life; his biography (backed by the two thousand pages of his manuscript ‘Notes on ...”

“... last month, has him playing an American Secret Service man haunted by his failure to protect John Kennedy on the day everyone remembers. Now another assassin, John Malkovich no less, is stalking another President: a risk for the incumbent but a chance of redemption for our hero. The regrets on the subject of violence are particularly murky. ‘Penance’ was ...”

“... apartment had previously been occupied by Vaughn Meader, once known for his impressions of John F. Kennedy. On the night of the assassination, Lenny Bruce supposedly walked out on stage and said: ‘Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.’ The colour field painter Stephen Mueller lived in the building, as did the poet Eleanor Lerman, who worked in the harpsichord ...”

“... that Lee Harvey Oswald saw The Manchurian Candidate, which was released in 1962, a year before Kennedy’s assassination. A more plausible cinematic influence on him is Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays a President’s assassin who acquired his taste for killing in the Second World War. Yet the idea was there in The Manchurian Candidate: an ...”

“... Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (2014), William Deresiewicz writes of his students at Yale: ‘Look beneath the façade of affable confidence and seamless well-adjustment that today’s elite students have learned to project, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety and depression, of ...”

“... to be considered a star in the society of Meriton; that the ‘considerable sum’ Mrs Norris gave William Price was one pound; that Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained ...”

“... in Hollywood, but none of his scripts was ever produced. He worked as a speech-writer for Robert Kennedy, a career cut short by JFK’s assassination. Recently, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in his writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This ...”