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“... beautiful kids, energetic misfits, hip weirdos, and the conventionally famous – by Warhol’s name, and by his odd ability to create a scene which seemed both open and closed at the same time. A salon of reprobates, it was vaguely countercultural, full of drugs and hurt and paranoia, but still it managed to be a place where work got done. The people who ...”

“... to retrieve her shopping, and took her place beside him. As the bus pulled away Azhar spotted Big Billy and his son Little Billy racing alongside, yelling and waving at the driver. Azhar closed his eyes and hoped it was moving too rapidly for them to get on. But they not only flung themselves onto the platform, they charged ...”

“... to New York in 1949, and shed his ethnic identity then, too, dropping the final ‘a’ from his name. He fared well as a commercial illustrator, with adverts done for Harper’s Bazaar, Seventeen, the New Yorker and Vogue, displays for Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller, I. Miller and Tiffany & Co., as well as book jackets, record covers, stationery and the ...”

“... to be hanging around’. Slowly, life became exciting after dark. One denizen in particular, Billy Name, Gopnik writes, ‘added darkness’ to the social life. Warhol worked with silkscreen prints of flowers ‘at the bright window end of the loft, amid collectors and dealers and other hangers-on from the mainstream’, while ...”

“... and lost again. Both are about nameless forces in the world, and about the folly of trying to name them. Both books start in an old North America, the Texas and New Mexico of the Forties, places where men who live on horseback meet men in rickety trucks on new blacktop roads; and both books take their heroes to a Mexico which is even older, a land of ...”

“... Their names suggest American middle-class innocence: Kenny, Johnny, Freddie. Only one of them, Billy Mogavero, is left behind. Billy went to jail for assaulting a cop, and now he is stuck in Winship, working as a clerk in a paint store. The lever of the plot tips when, years having passed, the group pays ...”

“... in Doctorow’s narratives; in Loon Lake the vagrant hero was given Joseph Conrad’s Polish name; in the more autobiographical World’s Fair the author’s own name was used. Here the hero-narrator is called Billy Bathgate. The allusion is not to the unlovely Scottish mining town ...”

“... was published his editor talked him into jettisoning a novel he’d worked on for six years. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, his first published novel, is the third he’s written. Fountain seems resigned to being seen as the slowest pen in the South so long as it’s understood that he isn’t a listless procrastinator. Interviewers tend to walk away ...”

“... is the territory that our hero enters in James Sallis’s novel Drive and the movie of the same name directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. The man thinks he can stay on the margins of crime, just drive the getaway car and not take any further part in the heists or the larger profits. It’s a living, just like his day job as a stunt man for the movies. Then one ...”

“... well find allegory of this kind a bit of a disappointment. Talbot, for instance, alludes to the name of the ship while never actually revealing it: ‘I looked over her monstrous figurehead, emblem of her name and which our people as is their custom have turned colloquially into an obscenity with which I will not trouble ...”

“... A hummable, weepable, narcissistic self-pity, hitherto only available in the speeches of Billy Graham and the recording work of Tammy Wynette, has, over the last few years, taken Britain by storm, and it is nowhere more evident than in the new style of celebrity autobiography. Many modern celebrities call everyday people ‘normals’, and it was a ...”

“... On Carla’s Song, he gave the actor Robert Carlyle a run-down of his character. ‘Your name’s George and you drive a bus. Maybe it would be a good idea if you learned to drive a bus.’ Had Loach stuck with theatre directing – an early pursuit – he would by now be bringing his plays to schools, hospital wards, disused factories. His ...”

“... who was saved from a Fascist prison and smuggled to America by Mafia types acting at the behest of Billy Rose, the famous Jewish showbiz figure (‘Damon Runyon’s pal’) whom he had never met. This is Harry: Fonstein’s type was edel – well-bred – but he also was a tough Jew. Sometimes his look was that of a man holding the lead in the 100-metre ...”

“... growing up with the music of Benjamin Britten, it was sometimes hard to recall that his last name was not ‘Britain’. The race that Nietzsche had deemed heavy-hoofed and unmusical, whose last truly great composer had been Purcell, a nation that had been doing nothing very much, musically, but warbling in cathedrals for a couple of centuries, had ...”

“... he issued a public declaration against the continuation of the war. But much more striking is Billy Prior, who advances stealthily through the trilogy, beginning as a mute casualty and ending as its central and most articulate character. His sexuality ambiguous, his attitude towards the authority of generals, doctors and civilians by turns contemptuous ...”