“... Ritz in Paris in January 1918 when he met the beautiful, patrician American divorcée Linda Lee Thomas at a breakfast marriage reception. Porter was living well at the time on ‘Grandfather’s tick’, as he called his inheritance; but Linda was ‘rich-rich’. She was eight years older than him, with fabled taste and impeccable manners, and counted ...”

“... decides to postpone the decease by means of a magic amulet, which the dying woman, who has her own brand of wisdom and cunning, promptly swallows. She, Yente, our all-seeing eye, then enters the condition of the undead, her living corpse secretly transferred from one hiding place to another (one of them, a grotto and a place of pilgrimage, will later be ...”

“... the ground while lawsuits circled menacingly in the skies above. The heavyweight contestants were Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner. A lengthy legal dispute took place as to who had been the first to establish the basic principles of the carbon microphone that would render Bell’s telephone system viable (that is to say, a paying proposition). The aim was to ...”

“... Charlie Chaplin, or even Mel Brooks. It was more the case, as MacDonald puts it, that ‘Bowie’s brand of fascism … was taken seriously by a certain hermetic compartment of his mind … The rest of him … was deeply uneasy about it.’ After the tour concluded in Paris later that May, Bowie retreated to the Château d’Hérouville, where he’d recorded ...”

“... of the existence of a bomb intended to destroy airliners in mid-flight contained in the same brand of cassette radio discovered on the plane; and evidence implicating a Palestinian splinter group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, which was prepared at the time to hire itself out to regimes that were known to be state ...”

“... straightforward kind of Conservative. Cameron recognised that if he was to ‘detoxify’ the Tory brand, loosen its association with uncaring Thatcherite economics, then he needed to explode the assumption that the Conservatives value freedom above all else. Instead, he began to articulate a social conservatism which balanced compassion for the ...”

“... the cries of seagulls overhead.Blumenthal has been an informal cultural ambassador for the umami brand ever since. Along with Thomas Keller and Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking, he has contributed words and enthusiasm to various publications from the Umami Information Centre, an organisation whose purpose ...”

“... Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.’ But alongside the blessings, kicks and curses is a running lament for the novel, which Vidal sees as ...”

“... Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen ...”

“... familias, a slightly peculiar Wotan in carpet slippers who is here depicted developing his own brand of toilet water (eau de Richard!). Wotan’s mythical family is transposed: ‘R. is pleased with the simplification of the gods’ serving staff in the Ring.’ It is fitting that R. died on an Italienreise, one of the essential parts of the ‘cures’ of ...”

“... One would feel able to admire their ingenuity were they not now becoming set texts, defining, in a brand new way, the function of poetry in British and American life. That is what plucks the comedy from this dark drama: it is a story that shows dumbing-down in freefall. Peter Forbes edited Poetry Review between 1986 and 2002, so you’d be right to label him a ...”

“... The​ tragedy of Thomas Kuhn’s life was to have written a great book. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, when he was forty, and he spent the rest of his life distressed by its success. It has sold 1.7 million copies, and has been translated into 42 languages. Very few academic books sell in those numbers and scarcely any are still seen as state of the art sixty years after publication ...”

“... the various uses made of Coriolanus in history creates particular difficulties for Patterson’s brand of essentialism because it indicates that no text is wholly obdurate, hardened into single meaning. The opposite case can be just as persuasively put. It would argue that texts yield only to reading and that reading is a political and a politicising ...”

“... memory of them survived into the Victorian period, even into the last century, it was with that brand burned into their reputations, with all the doubt it cast on the value of their writings. To confirm this point, Johnston repeatedly directs us to the late Victorian Dictionary of National Biography, and even sometimes to the revised version of 2004. This ...”

“... up when they discovered they had got what they wanted after all. The Tories have detoxified the brand, the Lib Dems have got their first real taste of power, and Labour has got the chance for an extended wallow in righteous opposition, having finally dumped Gordon Brown in the process. Have you ever seen such happy politicians? If the voters were trying to ...”