“... been shortchanged. So PVC with its lethal dioxins was now replaced by Teflon, the housewives’ friend. A mere seven or eight million quid would buy off the Germans and the fetishist’s umbrella could be safely domesticated. Mandelson, the Kubla Khan of New Labour, who had been eloquent in his defence of the original choice, was now equally enthused by its ...”

“... meum’; Joyce at a fancy-dress party where he managed to wangle first prize dressed as Handy Andy, Joyce reciting Yeats and saying, ‘No Surrealist poet can ever equal this for imagination’; Joyce commenting on a picture of the Christ-child, ‘Doesn’t he look as if he had just robbed the hen-house’; Joyce weeping over his beloved daughter ...”

“... affair with a 26-year-old called Ruth Kligman. One afternoon in August 1956, Kligman brought a friend along on the trip out to Amagansett, expecting Pollock to take them to the beach. Instead, Pollock dragged them to a bar, where they spent the afternoon watching him drink. On the way home his driving became erratic. The ...”

“... of Irish grandeur: he had been married to Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne’s daughter, and had been a friend of Yeats. I found myself sitting beside him in the student bar and it was astonishing and fascinating to hear someone talk with familiarity and slight contempt about Maud Gonne, and then withdraw into himself, become silent and vague and ...”

“... was out to ‘destroy any form of socialist thought. They are the enemy within.’ My Irish friend recommended that people get to know the enemy by reading a biography of Alastair Campbell. The meeting lasted longer than two hours. Throughout, in what people said, there was a frequent, unthinking slippage between ‘members’ and the ‘public’. In ...”

“... David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue Velvet) and that she resented Andy Warhol for making millions by turning her face into a silk screen image. What the book doesn’t do is discuss Taylor’s film performances in any depth. This starts to make more sense when you see that one of its recurring themes is Taylor’s own mixed ...”

“... personal gain rather than by institutions or principles.According to Boassen, last year he asked a friend at the Greenlandic government’s office in Washington how he could get an invite to Trump’s election night party. He heard nothing back, but when he saw his friend in Greenland a few months later, the ...”

“... at his Mar-a-Lago mansion. He entitled it The Visionary.He once turned down the chance of owning Andy Warhol’s pictures of Trump Tower. Warhol met the already famous Trump on 22 February 1981 at a birthday party for Roy Cohn. They met again on 24 April at Warhol’s Factory, where they discussed Trump Tower and agreed, Warhol noted in The ...”

“... the ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin) and then jumped to Paris. There, she found her old friend Harriet Sohmers, her hipster Virgil from Berkeley. Their romantic relationship resumed, and takes up many notebook pages. Only a small quantity of Paris gossip makes it into the diaries. Beauvoir speaks at the Sorbonne; Sontag is unfavourably impressed ...”

“... did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for a sulky, half-Catholic male adolescent. But Baudelaire the poet seemed to belong ...”

“... shocks for those whose wealth usually enables them to keep the contradictions at a distance. A friend of mine who prospered as a fund manager in London stepped back from finance and became involved in a charity that helps disadvantaged young people. On her way to a meeting of the organisation in a northern English town the taxi driver began telling her ...”

“... they were, by your loyalty, by your love, by your imagination, he would say, yes, I have been a friend to Scottish literature. And so he was.Curving down through the basin of the Doon Valley, we drove into the Scottish Borders. By Cappercleuch we turned and saw St Mary’s Loch, a beautiful, flat mirror beneath the brown and green of the hills. This is ...”

“... published in 1967, describes her visits to – and eventual prison break of – an elderly friend trapped and abused in a geriatric ward. Accounts such as these have, over the years, made a compelling argument for care as a site of fundamental questions about the limits of the welfare state. As Townsend put it, ‘the ultimate test of the quality of a ...”

“... It is striking that the National Academy of Sciences’ official memorial of him, by his old friend John Moll, contains not a single example of kindness or charm or goodwill, or indeed any anecdote which reflects any human credit on its subject. Instead Moll observes that Shockley’s ‘technical insights were counterbalanced by his lack of insight into ...”

“... in Christ,’ he shouted, ‘here is a great book that tells the Truth about Ulster. Go home, friend, and read it.’ The book was The Narrow Ground by A.T.Q. Stewart: did the book inspire Paisley, or did the voice of Old Ravenhill inspire The Narrow Ground? Accompanying this question is the problem of the relation of middle-class Unionism to ...”