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“... paid and the girls Bill got off with afterwards. Especially the girls. Wyman had 278 (he and Brian Jones counted up) during the first two years of the Stones. Odd, in a way, that he got rid of his original surname: Perks. Stone Alone is perversely fascinating in its grinding, routine repetitiveness: gig after gig after gig on tour after tour, more girls in ...”

“... to work doubly hard to make contemporary clothes disappear,’ another designer says, while Marit Allen, who worked on Brokeback Mountain, underlines the ‘subliminal telegraphy’ that clothes give out, adding the mysterious information that ‘polyester has a sexual connotation.’ Adrian (d. 1959; The Wizard of Oz, Marie Antoinette and dozens of other ...”

“... defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first ...”

“... contributors to Autopia grapple with these problems, but for the most part not very energetically. Allen Samuels tells us that the car ‘like all epochal icons . . . does not mean one thing, but many things’. In that sense it is an ‘empty sign. It is a vacuum. We fill it with meaning.’ Some of the contributions to Autopia suggest that any meaning will ...”

“... of your seemingly healthy Girton and Newnham Girls break down utterly. So, according to Grant Allen, writing in the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s, higher education could damage your health. More to the point, it interfered physically (not just, that is, by opening up wider and more attractive horizons than motherhood) with a woman’s capacity to bear ...”

“... In response to a query from Hoover – ‘Isn’t Baldwin a known pervert?’ – an Agent Jones responds: It is not a matter of official record that he is a pervert; however, the theme of homosexuality has figured prominently in two of his three published novels. Baldwin has stated that it is also ‘implicit’ in his first novel Go Tell It on the ...”

“... such a take-me-or-leave-me tone. It occurs to you that Miss Didion’s reasons for disliking Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and for attacking it at length in the New York Review, are perhaps largely defensive in origin. What is objectionable about Manhattan is not that it is knowing, cute, ‘in’, as Miss Didion claimed. What is objectionable about ...”

“... to believe that their personal details won’t be handed on to the authorities. When Johnson Jones Hooper wrote about his experience of ‘Taking the Census in Alabama’, he signed it ‘by a “Chicken-Man” of 1840’ – a reference to the common belief that his job was to identify (for tax purposes) every chicken, cow and loom. A hundred years ...”

“... In​ the Beat constellation, Allen Ginsberg’s star now shines more brightly than the rest. True, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs glowed on in the aftermath of On the Road (1957) and Naked Lunch (1959); Brion Gysin, inventor of the cut-up technique, is still visible on a clear night. But the beautiful Lucien Carr, an Alain Delon lookalike drawn into the Beat circle by a smitten scoutmaster who stalked him across America until Carr pulled out a knife and killed him in New York, no longer emits much light ...”

“... handwritten and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s. Two years had passed since the bookseller first published it, at the price of 1s, and not a single copy, it seems, had been ...”

“... out to be just such an epic use, and the poem ends:I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,Allen Ginsberg. I have done this thing,I and the other women this exceptionalact with the exceptional heroic body,this giving birth, this glistening verb,and I am putting my proud American boastright here with the others.This works perfectly well as satire on ...”

“... by his speech impediment and inability to keep to the point. But in a later conversation with Allen Barnett, who had been an Oxford classmate of Tolkien’s, Davenport learned that ‘Ronald’ had shown a great fascination with the surnames in Barnett’s native state: ‘He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat ...”

“... but when he came home, it was to a 270-acre ranch, which Redding called ‘the Big O Ranch’, in Jones County, twenty miles outside Macon. Although he had bristled at anything ‘country’, the life of a country squire was the one that he’d settled on. In 1966, he began to cross over in earnest with white audiences. That spring, Redding played a series of ...”

“... When Southern boy Elvis first went north to do some fancy New York TV, the usually quite hep Steve Allen miscalculated badly and showcased him in a dreary, patronising skit in which Elvis has to deliver his song to an actual slobbery hound dog. You can feel the Northern condescension and snobbery thick like molasses in the studio air. For his second TV ...”

“... Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and ...”