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“... a quixotic canard then became a surrealist juggernaut, culminating in the ousting of Governor Gray Davis and the risible election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, action figure, as the custodian of the world’s fifth largest economy. Like Schwarzenegger, Congressman Issa has a piquant history. In the early 1980s, his car-alarm company, which did work for a much ...”

“... than equally poor black or Latino Americans, something that has made them easy prey for what Mike Davis, in one of his last interviews, called the Republican ‘death cult’. In The Storm Is Here: America on the Brink, Luke Mogelson writes that ‘one emotional feature of contemporary conflict is the ever-present, low-frequency dread of random ...”

“... You may not like the book, but you will be impressed by the index. There’s Bette Davis and Joe Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. There’s Basil Dean and James Dean, Jack Warner of Dock Green and Jack Warner of Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield lines up alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore ...”

“... from cranky freelancer to feted urban guru (‘the Mother Theresa of urbanism’, as Mike Davis, a rare dissenter from the church of St Jane, once put it) came about through her encounter with the slum, as a concept and, less and less over time, as a reality. It was the slum, in the eyes of the planners of Radiant Garden City Beautiful, that ...”

“... Britain’s confident imperial narrative, it became a footnote: by the 1920s the historian H.W.C. Davis could refer in The Age of Grey and Peel to a ‘hare-brained and desperate plot’ that was ‘hardly possible to explain except on the supposition that [Despard’s] mind was disordered’. It was only restored to historical importance in the 1960s, in ...”

“... and failure, ecstasy and impasse’ constitute by far the most interesting section of Windrush, Mike and Trevor Phillips’s history of postwar black England. Early arrivals who had been weaned on Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickens imagined the metropolis as ancient and archival. They had peered at celluloid images of its citadels and monuments on the ...”

“... Basquiats are dullish and Haring is redundant) and the works before us are those by Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Robert Gober, a series of Cindy Sherman photographs which include a black-suited blonde-wigged creature whose one visible eye is also a mouth and a nostril and a wound, and a stunningly handsome and inventive example of Jenny Holzer’s electronic ...”

“... substance has been described more thoroughly and from such a variety of perspectives,’ Mike Jay writes in his new history, Mescaline. Its use in the Americas dates back thousands of years. It was the first psychedelic analysed by Western scientists, and in the early decades of the 20th century the only substance of its kind available to ...”

“... An anthropologist teaching in Atlanta, he writes in the tradition of urban studies established by Mike Davis’s pathbreaking City of Quartz. But there is more ethnographic texture in Davis’s Los Angeles: Rutheiser’s subject, which invokes a term invented by Disney, is ‘Imagineering’, the promotional synthesis ...”

“... presence in the city’s unions and electoral politics. The Communists Peter Caccione and Benjamin Davis got the second and fourth highest number of votes in the city council elections of 1945, and the Communist-influenced American Labor Party elected Vito Marcantonio, perhaps the most left-wing member of Congress, to the House of Representatives. Historical ...”

“... now laddish millionaire. He is, of course, a millionaire. The unexpectedly colossal sales of Mike Oldfield’s dreary Tubular Bells saw to that in 1973. The money was salted away in offshore family trusts which have ensured Branson’s own wealth no matter how dire the difficulty his companies might be in. Even at the time only the very gullible imagined ...”

“... sequel to Ziggy Stardust by a shake-up in personnel; above all, in the recruitment of Mike Garson on piano: I played a blues solo and David said: ‘No, that’s not what I’m looking for.’ Then I played a little Latin solo. ‘No, that’s not what I’m looking for’ … Then he said to me: ‘Well you told me about playing on the ...”

“... in the antebellum South, where Walter Scott’s novels were in every literate household. Jefferson Davis, the wartime president of the Confederate states, made a pilgrimage to Culloden four years after their defeat. Such thinking blossomed in the next decades, when in the imagination of its elites the South became like the Scotland of the Jacobites, who fought ...”

“... went platinum everywhere. I found a great BBC film on YouTube that explained how Mike Chapman, the Australian pop supremo behind Mud, the Sweet and other top acts of the glitter era of the mid-1970s, had basically taken the band’s cheerfully ragged, two-guitars-and-a-cheapo-organ garage-punk sound and dismantled it into dozens of ...”

“... would like, leaving them short of guiding threads through his labyrinthine sentences. Lydia Davis proposes that his ‘marked underuse of the comma’ shows not a lack of consideration but a subtle courtesy, by refusing to allow arbitrary subdivisions to get in the way of the reader’s attempt to grasp a complex thought in its entirety: if ‘a ...”