Search Results

“... there is a politics beneath the scandal-mongering of Washington Babylon, but whereas Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, the gossip columnists who wrote Washington Confidential, served the McCarthyite Right, Washington Babylon’s militants spread gossip for the populist Left. Cockburn and Silverstein personalise politics to underline the gap between an ...”

“... success. True to form on this second visit it was Isherwood who already had a date lined up: Vernon, ‘a beautiful blond boy, about eighteen, intelligent with very sexy legs’. From that out-of-the-body vantage-point he shares with God and Norman Mailer, Isherwood looks down on himself and his friend:Yes, my dears, each of you will find the person you ...”

“... hews to his excellent Victorian predecessor, just compare their all-but-identical dealings with Vernon Lee’s book as a whole. And to register some of the odd consequences of a 1990 book which battens on an 1887 one, consider the ironical dedication by Byron to the renegade Southey. It made cultural sense for Wheatley, in a Victorian world endemically ...”

“... history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with Soul. Along the way, that history has appropriated the music on behalf of a white audience by perpetuating the ...”

“... into the pool, hurting his back.’ The brace would keep the President upright for the bullets of Lee Harvey Oswald.Makes you wonder about the lighter side of Camelot. Here, at any event, is a suggestive minor-key connection between hubris and nemesis – or between Kennedy’s frantically sordid private life and the events that punctuated and then terminated ...”

“... Whitmer puts it in The Inner Elvis (1996), ‘there was a history to the emptiness that flawed Vernon’s character and created the subsequent psychological hole in Elvis’s personality. Both the lack of and the need for a father figure seemed to be a Presley family tradition.’ Vernon Presley struck his neighbours as ...”