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“... in it,’ Southey wrote thirty years later, ‘can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.’ Each saw in the other, or thought he did, an agent of that ...”

“... was writing in al-Ahram: ‘British intelligence assassinated Diana to save the throne, just as Marilyn Monroe was assassinated by American intelligence. Never before, not even during the days of Crom-well, did any one person manage single-handedly to shake the foundations of the royal family.’ Once the Windsors were convinced that Diana ‘would marry a ...”

“... standing as a poet has been doubtful or negligible. This is a position firmly summarised in Marilyn Butler’s handbook, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981). She argues that the only Coleridge to pause over is the man whose ‘really significant or at least influential career was as a moulder of opinion’ – that is, as a political ...”

“... we could bear life without a plot. An epigraph to the screenplay of True Romance, attributed to ‘French critics on the films of Roger Corman’, says: ‘His films are a desperate cry from the heart of a grotesque fast-food culture.’ In Tarantino the cry is not desperate, and his characters are capable of quoting this line as a joke. In Natural Born ...”

“... as a BMI of more than 30. For a sense of what these numbers mean, Leopold Bloom had a BMI of 23.8. Marilyn Monroe varied between 21 and 24. ‘Underweight’ is defined as below 18.5. During the past twenty years models in Playboy have gone down from 19 to 16.5. Fauja Singh, the fastest man on earth over the age of 90, has a BMI of 15.4. Autism resists ...”

“... as the ‘necessity to “relativise” heroism’, which is what we do when we disparage the French Resistance, or when we call Salvador Allende ‘a racist, an anti-semite and a eugenicist, for the purpose of denigrating the putative founding myths of socialism around the world’. Heroism, socialism and rebellion turn out to be synonymous, and the ...”

“... Channing-Eve Harrington face-off, but Susan Sontag wasn’t the new Mary McCarthy, any more than Marilyn Monroe had been the new Betty Grable. Sontag the public sensation (as opposed to Sontag the perpetual grad-school grind) was the star-child of Pop Art and New Wave. To see her in sunglasses was to see it was so. And in Roger Straus, the dapper major domo ...”

“... juxtaposed Western consumer or showbiz symbols with Soviet icons – Leonid Sokov’s Stalin and Marilyn, for instance, or Alexander Kosolapov’s Plan for an Advertisement in Times Square (a huge red poster with the Coca-Cola sign and Lenin’s face on it, and the slogan ‘it’s the real thing – Lenin’). By the late Eighties, everyone could be his own ...”

“... validate my experience of reading, and relishing, the novel London Bridge. How had the trepanned French maniac achieved such a rapturous sense of the city’s psychogeography – Willesden to Soho to Rotherhithe? I was introduced at the desk, in the way that one is, to an American writer who told me that he’d heard about my novels, even picked up ...”

“... been reading. Pierre Bourdieu’s Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture), written with Jean-Claude Passeron, was published in 1964. It was here he first tried out his argument that educational inequality has cultural as much as economic causes; that the ...”

“... other pinky figures and a bow-fronted display cabinet containing porcelain and ivory figurines. French windows led to a terrace with steps down to a garden which had a long lawn and a large greenhouse.Upstairs there were five rooms. A large bow-windowed bedroom at the front with a huge feather-bed belonged to my maternal grandparents. Next to it was the ...”