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“... withdrew from the star system, withdrawal became – for a time – the definition of stardom. Groucho Marx may well have been the only insider to call her bluff. Encountering her one day in an elevator on the MGM lot, he lifted the brim of her hat to peer underneath: ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I thought you were a fella I knew from Kansas ...”

“... plumbers and the women in beauty parlours. The Street shed its moral stigma and became fun; Groucho Marx speculated on the strength of hot tips from an elevator boy. ‘A Wall Street persuasion,’ Fraser concludes, ‘seeped deep down into the cultural bedrock.’ A long boom lured the people into the game. Industrial production rose 50 per cent ...”

“... be informed and helped by knowledge of the conceptual schemes involved. Zinoviev’s knowledge of Marx must also have been a crucial source of inspiration. In fact, many of the paradoxes of Hegelian and Marxist dialectic can be rendered in logical language, using precisely the kind of distinctions that Zinoviev has explored in his work on many-valued logic.6 ...”

“... Duck Soup (1933) has one of the cinema’s great moments of sceptical philosophy. Chico and Harpo Marx, both disguised as Groucho, are in Margaret Dumont’s bedroom, though Chico is hiding under the bed. Harpo departs and Chico suddenly appears. Dumont is shocked. Didn’t he just leave? Chico says he didn’t, and Dumont ...”

“... Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson ...”

“... with a fierceness I’d never seen in adults before. It was the first time I’d heard the name Marx, except in the context of the Marx brothers, and I knew it wasn’t Groucho they were talking about. They gesticulated, they leapt to their feet, one of them jabbed another in the chest ...”

“... to anyone (it’s hard to get away with satirising success in the States). He suggested to Harpo Marx one evening that they make a picture about the real Marx brothers. Groucho could play Karl, Harpo would be Engels, Chico Bakunin. Harpo replied: ‘They don’t do films like that ...”

“... first novel, is described on the jacket as ‘The Aspern Papers somehow performed by the Brothers Marx’. The bones of the plot do come from the same Henry James novella currently on view as a play at the Haymarket Theatre, but the comedy is not anarchic in the style of Groucho and Harpo – it is precise and ...”

“... about modernity’. (But of what kind? A lesbian Adorno or a lesbian Heidegger? A lesbian Groucho Marx? What about Harpo?) At the same time, however, such a premise is perhaps rather too advanced, not to mention vague, for those who have yet to wrap their heads around sapphism in its more local and earthbound incarnations. Indeed, from one harsh ...”

“... party’s composition is not consistent with my conscience’ – reminds one more of Groucho than of Karl Marx; anyway, Kadarkay doesn’t think it was the real reason. Nor, however, is there certain evidence that Lukács was tipped off about Khrushchev’s decision to crush the revolution with tanks. But since ...”

“... an essence only Medieval schoolmen could isolate, veering at one extreme into the territory of the Marx Brothers, at the other into the land of the Seven Dwarfs. They are more numerous than the Groucho clan, for, even with Zeppo and Gummo, you can’t get more than five – though I sometimes believe in the Sixth ...”

“... jostling them uncomfortably in what now seems to be a contracting political space. Like the Marx brothers, the Left finds itself plunged into reverie: do you remember when we used to talk about the means of production? The commanding heights? I remember when this was all dance-floor, sighs Groucho. The beginning of a ...”

“... that have a feeling of the early movies. He died before the talkies came in and so before the Marx Brothers, but there is an exchange in Horse Feathers that sums up Kafka’s relations with his father: Beppo: Dad, I’m proud to be your son. Groucho: Son, you took the words out of my mouth. I’m ashamed to be your ...”

“... in the strictest confidence: ‘What a coarse peasant ignorant woman I am! I always thought that Marx and Engels were a single philosopher. You know, like Ortega y Gasset.’ More relevant, however, were Haydée Santamaria’s revelations when she came back from her first trip to Russia and confided radiantly: ‘I met Ekaterina Furtseva in Moscow. You ...”