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“... part of that fascination. What’s more, there’s the rather different pedigree of its artist. As Andy Friend writes in his history of the golden age of British Communist art, ‘the Eton-educated Hastings’ was ‘a City stockbroker with Plantagenet forebears whose Mayfair residence, club and tailoring expenses were paid for by his father’, the 15th ...”

“... The affair came to an end in the summer of 2004. A few weeks later, on Friday 13 August, Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World, showed up at Blunkett’s office in Sheffield to ask whether he was having an affair with a married woman. Blunkett recorded their conversation. The tape became the most important single piece of evidence in the ...”

“... Andy Warhol in 1955 ‘Overlooked No More’ is the title of an occasional series in the obituaries section of the New York Times that prints obituaries of those – mainly women but also African Americans and homosexuals – who were ignored by the paper at the time of their deaths. Since the Times was launched in 1851, the omissions go back a long way ...”

“... Brown largely retreated from public life, ‘very down and down on himself’, according to an old friend quoted by James Macintyre in this well-sourced biography. He spent most of this period at home, a detached Victorian house in North Queensferry, a village looking across the dark waters of the Firth of Forth towards Edinburgh, where his political career ...”

“... enemy. Sophia Alderson is a ‘ridiculously beautiful’ young woman, who claims to be a close friend of the Virgin Mary. Near the start, in one of the book’s slightly lunging coincidences, she happens to walk into the church in St Pancras, wearing a sandwich board with a message about sin and the end of the world. She and Edgar have an argument which ...”

“... what it might be in the future. Selfhood was altering, sometimes under his baton, and like his old friend Andy Warhol he found it hard to imagine a world without his own intelligence still gaming at the centre of it. By the end he seemed to imagine that ideas alone might sustain the body. He lived on Diet Coke. When I first sat with him, in an hôtel ...”

“... was Judge Theodore Sedgwick who came to Stockbridge ‘after the Revolution’, and who was a friend of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. His descendants (but not, importantly, all of them) are buried, in ‘the Pie’, with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in, towards their ancestor. The legend is, apparently, that on Judgment Day ...”

“... there. Normally, it’s just unassumedly doing its job.’ He tells Smear’s singer, his best friend, ‘something rather ... untoward has happened.’ There is only so long, though, that the surprise and the novelty of the situation can keep at bay what has actually occurred. And Alex’s rape is just the start. The rest of the book is a long corridor of ...”

“... to become onerous. ‘Land in Beirut for a meeting,’ he writes of a visit in 2006. ‘An old friend, Fawwaz Traboulsi, picks me up at the airport. Notices that I am in a very long queue. I see him on the phone. Ten minutes later a security officer emerges, calls my name, has my passport stamped and escorts me out to where Fawwaz is waiting.’Ali’s ...”

“... me he had spent much of the 1980s watching friends in Edinburgh succumb to it. ‘I’ve got this friend who’s been a junkie for 25 years,’ he went on. ‘He said to me when Trainspotting came out: “Why have you written this book? You’ve only been a junkie for five minutes.” Well actually, it was 18 months. It was a stupidity and a weakness. I’ve ...”

“... discreet Mrs Donaldson scarcely knew they were in the house. Laura was a medical student and Andy, her boyfriend, was doing architecture (Mrs Donaldson thought this might have something to do with their neatness), and it was through them that Mrs Donaldson had been taken on as a part-time demonstrator, the advert spotted by Laura in the medical school ...”

“... New York) gave plausibility to the promotional prose. AT–T was the work of Philip Johnson, the friend of Andy Warhol, and so the publicity came with a background story ready to hand. The Post-Modern would be the art-historical movement that went beyond art by stopping short of art. Where Modernism was enchanted by ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... has been compromised: that he is in some sense ‘unclean’. The McIvors’ nearest neighbour and friend, Barney Mason, is particularly anxious, and his unscrupulous roust-about, Andy McKillop, who sees two black men visit Gemmy and talk with him, plays on these fears. There is a night raid. Gemmy is abducted, beaten, and ...”

“... fantasy has a few sustaining mythologies, and one of them is dignity, a quality defined, after Andy and Fergie, more by its absence. The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the Yorks, however, enjoyment was everything, and the notion of royal sacrifice, arguably a red herring in the ...”