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“... their arm and said: ‘Listen!’ I’m glad I was alone, because, so help me, it was only Elton John. The music was so nearly drowned out by the ship’s engines that I’d just caught the top notes. I bent down, stuck my ear to the speaker and yes, it was Elton John, singing, of all things: ‘Don’t let the sun go down ...”

“... violence – has long been a classic theme. Charlotte Brontë’s excoriating portrait of Mrs Reed in Jane Eyre is undoubtedly an attack on some detested female oppressor of her youth: Brontë’s description fairly seethes with murderous venom. Edith Wharton heroines, steely girls on the make such as Lily Bart or Undine Spragg, routinely anathematise the ...”

“... or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement a cautionary tale ...”

“... movie scene, who had also popularised Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘acid Western’ El Topo and John Waters’s ‘filth epic’ Pink Flamingos. Waters – a direct contemporary but no eagle scout – was another early Lynchhead. Eraserhead isn’t what we now associate with 1970s ‘cult’ cinema – it isn’t camp or explicitly countercultural and it ...”

“... of the muddled centre, as Goldhill wants us to see him, counterposed against sexual radicals like John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter: it is like using Greta Garbo to make a point about the excesses of Oliver Reed. (Here, as elsewhere, there is an unresolvable tension between the idea of queerness as ...”

“... Ella Mae Morse doing ‘Cow Cow Boogie’, and, in his Hollywood debut, a slender young reed called Frank Sinatra. Even at the time, Sinatra’s cameo didn’t cause much of a stir, and Reveille doesn’t feature in many official filmographies; but it did mark, in its modest way, the inception of Sinatra’s solo career. He had just left the Tommy ...”

“... the war in Algeria, as it had the campaigns in Indochina, was sabotaging it. Britain was a broken reed. For the last Governments of the Fourth Republic, still committed to the French empire in Africa and planning for a French bomb, European unity alone could furnish the necessary counterweight to Washington. Six months later, the Treaty of Rome was signed by ...”

“... the cinematography or the design.It was the beginning of the off-network TV tsunami that John Landgraf, the head of FX, calls peak TV. By 2022, he estimates that there were 559 scripted original shows on American television. HBO followed The Sopranos with Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Entourage, True Blood, Boardwalk ...”

“... Prix of the fastest, whitest drugs available. He brushed aside compatriots/competitors like Elton John and called Mick Jagger the ‘sort of harmless bourgeois kind of evil one can accept with a shrug’. If pushed, this apprentice warlock could also recite Derek and Clive’s ‘The Worst Job I Ever Had’ by heart and generally came on like a twisted ...”

“... emergence … is shattered’. Barker starts with Patrick walking up to the gates of St John’s College, Cambridge. This, we say to ourselves, is where it all began.Harman prefaces her biography with a scene in the present tense. It is, she tells us, ‘1 September 1843 and a 27-year-old Englishwoman is alone at the Pensionnat Héger in ...”

“... pigeons, collared doves, wrens, blackbirds, blue tits, great tits, carrion crows, starlings and reed buntings; they found four badger setts, without badgers in residence, which they recommended sealing off. No evidence of bat activity, or of great crested newts. Water voles would be translocated. Chestnut said a public consultation it carried out in late ...”

“... against the blackness of the night.’ When Wilde called him over, he sat down and began to play a reed flute. ‘He had an olive complexion; I admired the way his fingers held his flute, the slimness of his boyish figure, the slenderness of the bare legs that protruded from his billowing white shorts, one of the legs folding back and resting on the other ...”