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“... is his most significant contribution, no exposition of it is clearer or more helpful than that by Barry Smart in Foucault, Marxism and Critique. But now that Foucault has de-emphasised his conception of power and shifted his attention to sexual ethics, all three groups of questions must be reconsidered. Does the story Foucault tells in the newest volumes ...”

“... over-anxious to play down. He lives, apparently, on the family farm. The cover picture has him in smart check shirt and braces, no doubt chewing a slug of baccy. Like Pynchon’s and Nelson Algren’s, his writing celebrates tips, junkyards, diners, small-town sheriffs’ offices. ‘Small’ is an understatement. These are virtually ghost towns, with less ...”

“... and unsentimental in its judgments. Barack Obama Sr emerges as a minor tragic figure. He was smart, ambitious and eager to join the first generation of Kenyans to govern their country after the end of British rule. He was also afflicted by overweening arrogance, dogmatic certainty and a self-destructive fondness for Johnnie Walker Black. In spite of his ...”

“... greyer than the version flourished in early snapshots – the cover of A Serial Biography, the Barry Flanagan etching from Act – but this is still the same mouth, the same disguise. The same bite. The lights are on and there is somebody at home. The speed of eye/ear/mind remains, absolutely, that of a particle accelerator. Heart is everything: the ...”

“... to get hold of it, and he gets very nervous when we go anywhere near it.’ His other colleague, Barry, likes to stick his lips out and clench his teeth and go DA-DA, in imitation of the guitar riffs on Clash records. He otherwise spends much time talking about music, films, Terry Prat-chett ‘and anything else which features monsters, planets and so ...”

“... as culturally over-extended. Stead was writing in the LRB about his friend and fellow Antipodean, Barry Humphries. Humphries is nowadays primarily a West End and small screen entertainer with his largest viewing constituency in Britain. The same – but more – could be said of Clive James. James has earned himself reputations as a television ...”

“... and pathos that remains appealing, a sense that behind the secretary and the filing clerk and the smart awareness of the blessings of publicity there still lingers the Jewish boy who didn’t know much about the world, and could not reject madness because it would have meant rejecting his ...”

“... or even tolerable. Pierre’s splendour is the creation of a voice, that of a bitter, troubled but smart 15-year-old Texan schoolboy, Vernon Gregory Little. Vernon narrates the book, and hurls his spiked words right at us. At his best, Pierre captures a pathetic combination of defensive cynicism and pain. Vernon hates his stupid, materialistic mother, who ...”

“... Smirke, with what Pevsner called ‘high Victorian cruelty’, to house the Royal Academy. Charles Barry Jr and Robert Banks added the ranges that enclose the courtyard and house the Linnean, Geological and Astronomical Societies and the Society of Antiquaries. Solid Victorian temples to art and the life of the mind, they preserve something of the dignity, not ...”

“... spurred conferences, projects and studies. The books run from Anthony Heilbut’s chatty and smart overview. Exiled in Paradise, to more specialised volumes like Barry Katz’s Foreign Intelligence, which tells the story of the Office of Strategic Services – the predecessor to the CIA that employed a bevy of refugee ...”

“... modification and change. While his supporters, smarting at unsavoury rumours, maintain he stayed smart to the end, the rest speculate about unsocial behaviour and a diet which consisted primarily of pretzels and pills. So business booms, and eight years after his death Presley has been launched on a fresh and exciting career as the avatar of the good and the ...”

“... 88 when its author died, and is 97 now. Still the books keep coming. This latest pair, by Barry Gewen and Thomas Schwartz, have moved beyond outrage to something more like bafflement, tinged with affection. Each begins with an effective admission of authorial uncertainty: why, they ask, am I writing about Henry Kissinger, when so much has been written ...”

“... at the opening of Harold Pinter’s first play, The Room. ‘It was the alcoholics’ paradise,’ Barry Humphries writes in his introduction to Darren Coffield’s entertaining book.You merely ran up a slate. Later, much later, came the reckoning, but you never knew how they arrived at the astronomical total, and alkies like to pay more anyhow. It’s our ...”

“... and eyewitness evidence lead only to heroic successes, as in the murder trials of Colin Stagg and Barry George. That sentence of Foster’s sounds like a modest proposal; indeed, it is a modest proposal. But Author Unknown is less modest, which is one of the things that prevent it from being as good as it should be, given that Foster’s methods, anecdotes ...”

“... All was high purpose and serious business in the Nader household. Ralph hung out with the other smart kids, playing chess and poring over baseball statistics. He and his best friend did their homework listening to Yankee games on the radio, recalculating each player’s batting average after every time at bat. Young Ralph was on the way to becoming a ...”